The Thread of Faith

The Rev. Sandy Selby – St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Akron

Second Sunday of Easter, Year C – April 15, 2007 (11:00 service)

Text: John 20:19-31

The Presbyterian minister and author Frederick Buechner tells the story of his friend, an apparently healthy 68 year-old man who died in his sleep.

He died in March, and in May my wife and I were staying with his widow overnight when I had a short dream about him. I dreamed he was standing there in the dark guest room where we were asleep looking very much himself in the navy blue jersey and white slacks he often wore. I told him how much we had missed him and how glad I was to see him again. He acknowledged that somehow. Then I said, “Are you really there, Dudley.” I meant was he there in fact, in truth, or was I merely dreaming he was. His answer was that he was really there. “Can you prove it?” I asked him. “Of course,” he said. Then he plucked a strand of wool out of his jersey and tossed it to me. I caught it between my thumb and forefinger, and the feel of it was so palpably real that it woke me up. That’s all there was to it. It was as if he’d come on purpose to do what he’d done and then left. I told the dream at breakfast the next morning, and I’d hardly finished when my wife spoke. She said that she’d seen the strand on the carpet as she was getting dressed. She was sure it hadn’t been there the night before. I rushed upstairs to see for myself, and there it was—a little tangle of navy blue wool (from The Clown in the Belfry).

“Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed.” That is how the day had started for the followers of Jesus. Mary had wept bitterly, but when Jesus called her by name she ran to the disciples and said, “I have seen the Lord!” Simon Peter had looked at the empty tomb and then left. We’re not told whether or not he believed at that moment. When the Beloved Disciple went into the empty tomb, he “saw and believed.”

That night, the disciples—other than Thomas--were in a room with the door locked because they were afraid. Jesus appeared to them, showed them his hands and his side, and they rejoiced. When Thomas arrived later, he said he would not believe until he had seen and touched Jesus himself. We’re told that when Jesus appeared to him a week later, Thomas believed.

Unquestioning belief, reluctant belief, ambivalence, doubt. In the story of Easter morning and evening we hear of the full range of faith responses to the astounding events of that day.

Because this story is so familiar, we tend to define Thomas as “Doubting” Thomas, somehow less committed and less faithful than the other disciples. But to do this is to sell Thomas a bit short. After all, he wasn’t hiding in a room with the door locked when Jesus first appeared! The gospel story doesn’t tell us where Thomas was at that point. And what about the disciples that did see the Risen Lord? John tells us that a week later, when Jesus returned and appeared before Thomas, they were all still in the house with the door shut!

While we tend to remember Thomas by the gospel that is always read on the Second Sunday of Easter, he appears in a few key roles in John’s gospel. When Jesus decides to visit his sick friend Lazarus, Thomas knows this is a dangerous trip and tells Jesus: “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” At the Last Supper it is Thomas who asks: “If we do not know where you are going, how can we know the way?” To which Jesus replies in those words that have come to mean so much to us: “I am the way and the truth and the life.”

The non-canonical Gospel of Thomas describes many great acts of this disciple. He is said to have gone on to India, where he is revered by many as the founder of the Christian church in that part of the world. We remember Thomas for his doubt, but the gospel tells us the story of a man on a faith journey. Bravery, fear, confusion, doubt, faith. Is his journey so different from ours?

Frederick Buechner says, “Whether your faith is that there is a God or that there is not a God, if you don’t have any doubts you are either kidding yourself or asleep” (Wishful Thinking).

Nearly twenty-five years ago a tragedy in my immediate family profoundly shook my faith. I lost my belief in God—at least, the God that had fit very well within my comfortable world. I found myself in a spiritual desert, forcing myself to go to church and often finding the message hollow and meaningless. Years later I emerged from the wilderness with a different kind of faith and a different understanding of God.

It has been said that doubt isn’t the opposite of faith but an element of faith. Remember the story in the 9^th chapter of Mark’s gospel about the father of the epileptic child who says: “Lord I believe; help my unbelief!” Doubt keeps the door open, if only a crack, and in the void the voice of God can finally be heard.

I like the way that Buechner puts it: “Faith is better understood as a verb than a noun, as a process than a possession. It is on-again-off-again rather than once-and-for-all. Faith is not being sure where you’re going but going anyway. A journey without maps” (Wishful Thinking).

Back to his story about the man in the blue wool jersey:

The dream about my friend may well have been just another dream, and you certainly don’t have to invoke the supernatural to account for the thread on the carpet…or maybe my friend really did come to me in my dream and the thread was his sign to me that he had. Maybe it is true that by God’s grace the dead are given back their lives again and that the doctrine of the resurrection of the body is not just a doctrine. Things like my dream story happen every day to everybody. They mean absolutely nothing. Or… Things like that are momentary glimpses into a Mystery of such depth, power, beauty, that if we were to see it head-on, we would be annihilated….The evidence both ways is fragmentary, fragile, ambiguous. A coincidence can be, as somebody has said, God’s way of remaining anonymous, or it can be just a coincidence. Is the dream that brings healing and hope just a product of wishful thinking? Or is it a message from another world?

If someone were to come up and ask me to talk about my faith, it is exactly that journey that I would eventually have to talk about—the ups and downs of the years, the dreams, the odd moments, the intuitions. I would have to talk about the occasional sense I have that life is not just a series of events causing other events as haphazardly as a break shot in pool causes the billiard balls to careen off in all directions but that life has a plot the way a novel has a plot, that events are somehow or other leading somewhere. Whatever your faith may be or my faith may be, it seems to me inseparable from the story of what has happened to us (The Clown in the Belfry).

His story, your story, my story. Toward the end of today’s gospel, Jesus says “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Behind closed doors the Risen Lord gives the frightened disciples the gift of the Holy Spirit. They learn, reluctantly at first, that faith is more a verb than a noun, and empowered by the Holy Spirit open the door and go out into the world to proclaim the good news. And guess what: here we are today, joining our voices with theirs to testify to the presence of the Risen Lord. Alleluia!