Composting Doubt                                                                                                    Sermon, Easter 2 Year A  

I am in awe of people who grow things.  With Earth Day in mind, and inspired by our community garden, I have been thinking about gardening. My gardening friends tell me it is healing to have their hands in the dirt, to nurture life from the ground, as a co-Creator with God. As for me, I am a danger to all plant life. When friends bring plants to my house, it is inviting them into hospice care. I try to make their last days gentle and pain-free, but there is no doubt that death will be the outcome. 

It turns out that right around now in Northern Indiana, farmers are getting ready to plant corn and soybeans. I know this from Brian Scott, who blogs about farming on thefarmerslife.com.  He may start earlier in the Spring, if the weather’s been warm, or wait longer if it’s been cool and wet. But this very day, his seeds went into the ground in 2014, and again in 2012. How does he know when it’s time to plant?  Brian says, “we don’t have a system of numbers or charts to tell us when the soil moisture is right for planting. This is a boots-in-the- field and hands-touching-soil type of operation.” He goes out into the field and looks at the dirt. He’s looking for it to be a bit dry on top, but with no deep cracks. Then he pokes it, feeling for moisture about 2 inches deep—but not wet soil, and definitely not muddy. My brother-in-law Dale, a farmer in Iowa, used to actually taste his soil from time to time--he said he was tasting for acidity. “You want it to taste like good dirt,” he said to me, in all seriousness. He also hung around with farmers at the feed store to find out when they were planting. But Dale never liked to give away too much himself. He wasn’t superstitious, but he had great respect for what was at stake—his entire year’s livelihood--and he approached his work thoughtfully and with a certain reserve.

Doubting Thomas, Mark Tansey

So I was wondering why Thomas wasn’t with the other eleven disciples when they first saw the risen Jesus.  We don’t really know why, but I like to think he was out in his tractor, planting—because the soil told him it was time. Or maybe he was feeding his likestock. These are the kinds of things that don’t pause, even for a resurrection. In any case, when the disciples come to Thomas breathless, and excited and full of the Spirit, I envision him listening with a face like Henry Fonda in the Grapes of Wrath, just taking it in. He pauses for a moment and bites down on his piece of straw and says, “now that’s something I’d like to see for myself.”

And for this, Thomas has been cast as one lacking faith. But I say he is like that farmer. Imagine if the farmer came home from the feed store one day and said, well everybody’s planting, so I guess I will too.  His wife would look at him and say, have you looked at the ground yet? You know he would go put his hands in the dirt. He would see for himself.

Even more than our farmer, Thomas is in uncharted territory. He’s heard the other disciples say they have seen Jesus, but he hasn’t.  Furthermore, the disciples are not really acting any different. They’re sitting with him in a locked room, virtually in the dark. In fear. Even more than they, Thomas must have been wondering—What. Is. Going. On.

And the story continues, that in some mysterious manner, Jesus is now in the room. How did he get there? It’s not clear. That must have been weird. And so, Thomas practices a well-known and evidence-based technique for managing stress, and that is, checking in with this senses.

I follow the poignant blog of a man struggling with mental illness, and he writes, “One thing that can rescue me when I’m adrift and starting to feel separated from reality is confirming my physical reality. That I’m grounded in my body and that my five senses are with me.” It was appropriate for the disciples to question the relationship of this apparition of Jesus to reality, and if it was real, to wonder what it meant. If these doubts threatened to overwhelm Thomas, he responded by seeking to ground himself with the help of his senses.  

Now while John assigns the doubts about the resurrection to Thomas, other Gospels incorporate elements of doubt. In Matthew the disciples went to the mountain in Galilee as Jesus has told them, and “when they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.” In Luke, Mary has told the disciples what she has seen at the tomb. “But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them.” And the disciples are full of doubt about what it all means. In Luke, they are startled and frightened. In Mark, the women at the tomb said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid. Here in John, the others have seen Jesus for a week, but they’ve locked themselves in a room together in fear. It’s not just Thomas who is in doubt.  

So I don’t think John is punishing doubt, in Thomas or his readers. All Gospel writers seem to acknowledge that what the disciples are being asked to take in is mind-blowing. And it has really, really high stakes.

Thomas understands this.  Because once he has seen, Thomas is the one who knows immediately what it means. He says something that none of the disciples said the week before, or say in the other Gospels.  He says, “My Lord and My God!”  He understands Jesus as not just his rabbi, but the crucified God, the Messiah. He is now the believing Thomas, voicing what has been called “the last and best declaration of full-blown faith” in all of the Gospels. 

“My Lord and My God.” This is not an exclamation, like OMG!! Thomas has received the revelation that is the culmination of the entire Fourth Gospel. He has put together the theological puzzle—Jesus is the Word made Flesh.

And did you notice that Thomas does not tell Jesus to show him his body? It is Jesus who offers him that opportunity, without any judgment.  It’s also significant that Jesus has returned to his disciples for this brief time, raised from the dead, but with his hands and feet and side unhealed. The wounds of death remain, like a signature. How was it that Thomas knew that it was those wounds he needed to see to believe that the crucified one was the Lord? He could have said, I need to see his face, or get a look at his halo. 

By demonstration, Jesus says, “behold my body, that of the wounded healer. But now you are my body.” We are his body. We are the community that confesses the risen Christ. Richard Hays wrote that the world says to us, “unless I thrust my hand into the church and find real wounds, no way will I believe.” So we must show to the world what Jesus offered. We must show our own wounds, our own vulnerability, to those who are unswayed by the fake news of cheap salvation, those who have become deadened to simplistic platitudes and easy answers, black and white certainty, the hypocrisy and inconsistency between the words and the example of the church, and its hostility to people who ask questions in their doubt. We who confess Jesus are no better, no more holy, and no different from those who do not. We must embrace and engage our own doubts, for faith and doubt are dynamic things. Frederick Buechner once said, “if there is no room for doubt, there is no room for me.” Amen to that.

Jesus knows we doubt. It's how we're made. When Jesus said, “Bless-ed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe”—he is not rebuking Thomas, for he could show Thomas what he needed. He was talking about us—we who could not see what Thomas saw--who did not walk with Jesus as the first apostles did.

Liturgy is beautiful. Scripture is engaging. Words can illuminate—I hope my words do. Knowledge is helpful--doctrine, maybe less so. But faith is nurtured by experience, especially in community, experience we feel, and touch, and taste, and hear. Faith is a knowing in the heart, assurance of what it is hoped for, as it says in the letter to Hebrews. Jesus showed up for Thomas where he needed this assurance. For Thomas it was seeing the wounds. For the farmer it is feeling the dirt. How do we now show up for others and meet their doubts?  Seeds of faith need water and nourishment, and protection. There is nothing gained in standing over them and demanding them to grow. 

The Gospel is no ghost story--no science fiction about a visitor from another planet. No, it is a personal invitation to come close—and to experience the love of Christ as love and radical hospitality in the world. There is no need to apologize for engaging our bodies and our senses in this walk, for Jesus was the incarnate God, and his ministry was in the world. Now we are given this ministry to the world’s Thomases--to the Thomas in each of us. And so we go forward in love as Christ did, as cultivators of faith. We show up for others in tangible ways-- feeding, hugging, healing, and listening to them; giving furnishings to a refugee family, knitting them a shawl interwoven with prayers; digging our hands into God’s green earth in our garden. We show up with the bodies we are given and with all our wounds, and we meet people where they are--as Jesus did for Thomas in that locked room. As God showed up for humanity in Christ.  

I’ll see you in the garden.

St Gabriel Episcopal Church, Portland OR, Apr 23, 2017