Sermon - 27 April 2025 - Father's Day

If you will turn behind you, on the Eastern wall of the Church, you will see a painting of Thomas the Apostle, the protagonist of our gospel this morning, and you will see that he holds a scroll and a spear.  Iconography of Thomas commonly includes the scroll and spear, the scroll symbolizing that he will spread the gospel to the far ends of the earth, and the spear pointing to his death as a martyr for Christ. 

Sometimes the iconography of Thomas includes carpenters tools, because after Jesus death, there are Christian writers, including Origen, a church father, who claimed that Thomas went to India and started Christian churches there. 

But as revered as Thomas the Carpenter is in India today, we here in the West have focused on a different aspect of the Apostle Thomas. 

We have focused on the Doubting Thomas.

And now that I have you twisted around in your seats, I have a question for you.

If you never experienced doubted, how would your life be different? I’d ask you to lean a little forward in your seat and take a moment and think about that. Let me repeat it.  If you never experienced doubt, how would your life be different? What would that feel like? To never have seen something, and yet still be certain of it?

For example, if you were absolutely certain of the existence of a providential and loving God, even though you had never seen this God, how would your life be different?

If you knew that this Easter event – Jesus being crucified, nailed to a cross, and three days later rising from the dead – ff you did’nt just believe in this event, but knew that it was factual and true even though you did see it or understand it, and no one could really explain it to you in a rational way, how would your outlook change?

Please sit with that question for a minute. If you believed these things, how would your life be different?

To be sure, you would live with more confidence… but don’t just think that.  Imagine how this lack of doubt would be connected to greater confidence.  Lean forward in your pew, just a little bit please, and imagine what that confidence would feel like. 

Because you are certain in the existence of a loving god, you can now be completely vulnerable to all your anxieties.  You have them, they register with you, but you bypass them.  They no longer oppress you.

When you do wrong, and you repent of your wrong, you are now certain of God’s forgiveness.  Can you imagine, after you have hurt someone you love, and repented of it, but you no longer had to worry that they forgive you? 

And when others do you wrong, and you feel the sting of their words or actions, imagine that you look into their eyes, actually, look past their, look into their soul,  and you can be compassionate.  You can turn your other cheek to them.  Can you see yourself doing that? What does that feel like?

Here is another idea.  Because you – and all creation – has been redeemed, you have been freed from everything which has heretofore bound you.  You can now take risks.  You can start new things that have the possibility of failure, even great failure. 

And finally, because you live with confidence in Easter, you can now endure suffering.  You still feel your suffering, there is no getting around the pain of our humanity, but you live with the certain knowledge that it is nothing compared with the glory yet to come. We still grow old and have aches and pains, and we lose loved ones, and we see loved ones hurt.  Yet we are confident in the glory that will come. 

So returning to the words of the Gospel, Our Lord has just said to Thomas, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.”

What prompted Jesus to say this?

It was Thomas that prompted this.  When he required proof. And here is the thing.  This proof has that Thomas is ok.  What Thomas requested was born of a rational mind. 

Jesus doesn’t get upset.

He doesn’t lecture or correct Thomas, he doesn’t tell Thomas he is wrong.  Rather, Jesus directly and exactly responds to Thomas questions.  Here he says, probe my wounds.  He gives to Thomas the empirical answer that Thomas’ rational mind has requested. 

And Thomas responds, my Lord and my God! 

But then Jesus throws a wrench. 

He says because you have seen, you have believed.  Blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed.

Is Jesus disapproving of Thomas because he previously doubted? That’s what it sounds like.  But maybe there is another way to understand what Jesus has told Thomas.  Let me tell you a story that might explain why.

So in the late 1980s, I went to a Roman Catholic seminary.  I was there with about 120 other young men from around the South East United States. We were from Texas and Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana.  Every day, in addition to our praying as a community and being formed as seminarians, we read Plato and Aristotle with Father Michael, and we read Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas with Father Marian.  We had metaphysics with Brother Augustine and logic and epistemology with Father Maestri.  And along the way, we even read some atheist philosophers, like Camus, Sartre and Nietzsche.  And we read about agnostic scientists like Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins and Richard Feynman. 

So there was this one guy, named Gustave Castille, and his nickname was Lo-Lo, and he was Cajun from way down south on the bayou Lafourche, from a town called Galiano, which actually is about 10 miles south of Cutoff.  Now this Lo-Lo guy a really happy go lucky always filled with grace kind of guy. He spoke with a really tick Cajun accent. But as happy go lucky as he was, Lo Lo was always fussing about having to study philosophy.  He was always saying “Ma cher, I just want to love ta little baby Jesu.  Why dey make me learn all dis philosophy and science and all dat college stuff?”

So why would they do that? Make us read pagan and atheist philosophers? Make us read agnostic scientists? All these ideas that could challenge your thinking? Challenge your assumptions?

That’s a good question. 

They did it because when you have no doubts about the existence of a loving god, you fear nothing that is true.   You can take risks. You can encounter things that challenge your thinking, things that challenge your faith. And as you work through these challenges, and are vulnerable before those challenges, the depth of your faith will increase.

Let me say it a different way.  As we grow our intellect and understanding, our faith can increase; and as our faith increases, our intellect and understanding can grow as well. 

And at the very same time, even as we engage in this tension between faith and reason, blessed will be the Lo-Los of the world.  Those persons who believe in the goodness of the Lord without ever reflecting on it, without ever needing proof.  And that’s ok.

So I started out this morning asking what our life would be like if we never doubted, and it seemed like it might pretty good.  But then I told a story about how there can be value in going to places where we are challenged by doubts. 

That is what my logic professor Father Maestri would have called a contradiction.  But that’s just on the surface, and it is suggestive of something that makes us unique as Lutherans. 

It is indeed a contradiction, but it is also what is called a dialectic.  That’s a fancy word, but what it refers to is the tension between two opposing things, and how that tension results in new things.

For example, as Lutherans, we live with the dialectic tension of knowing that we are absolutely sinners and yet we are saved. 

Last time I was here, we said that we are “semper peccator, semper iustus” do you remember that? Always a siner, always justified.  Do you see the tension of those two opposing things? That’s a dialectic.  That particular dialectic is a uniquely Lutheran one.

Pay attention to that tension. 

This coming week, when you are driving alone in your car, remember that as a Lutheran, you are sinner and saints, all at the same time.  And that doubt might be at the heart of the tension you feel, it is causing you to grow.

I need to tell you that when I read those philosophers and scientists, when I read Camus and Sartre and Dawkins and the like, I was really challenged by them.  They caused me to doubt. I always had a need to believe in God, I wanted there to be a providential and loving God, but I had doubts. I had questions. 

As the philosopher Heidegger wrote, it sometimes seemed that God seemed to have receded from the world. 

I heard a lot of superficial Christianity tell me not to doubt, but the bell had been rung. It couldn’t be unrung. These were serious questions from serious people.

But it didn’t mean that they had the last say in the matter,

Because I had an insight.  It’ took a while to grow inside me, to achieve a critical mass in my intellect, a tipping point.  But it did.  It was an insight that turned my thinking on this subject completely around, completely upside down.  Maybe you have had this insight too. 

I realized that it was not really whether important if I believed in a loving God.  Or any God for that matter.  I realized that I could persist in my doubt.  I could live in the tension of wanting there to be a god and sometimes unsure of him. In the big scheme of things, it didn’t mattered.  It was not remotely important. 

What was important was that this Loving God believed in me. 

Let me say it a different way.  The lesson from the Gospel reading today is that it didn’t matter that Thomas didn’t initially believe in the risen Lord.  What mattered was that Jesus had always believed in Thomas. 

And I hope that in everything you do, you live with the confidence of a person who has no doubts.  When we live that way, we are just like Lo-Lo and others, and are blessed.  In the same way that the poor are blessed.

But even if you do struggle to believe in a good and merciful God, remember this loving God believes in you. 

Ponder that.  He believes in you.  He trusts and empowers you.  His hand is upon you.  His spirit guiding you. 

May Almighty god bless us…..