Peter JB Carman
Emmanuel Friedens CHurch
April 28, 2019
I.
They say he arrived in India around the year 52, in our era. Already he had been spreading the faith in Syria. In India he gained a reputation with princes as a master builder. That was his day job. But, for the people, his achievement was not buildings but the founding of new houses of faith. He died at the hands of violent men, on orders from an angry king. He died as he had lived, giving witness to the Teacher who sent him.
His name was Thomas—Thomas the Twin, Didymus in Greek. One of the original Twelve. Far from his home, he was the founder of the Christianity in India. The Christian population of Sri Lanka— recently targeted in numerous terror attacks-- also remember him as their founder.
Thomas the apostle, last of the apostles to believe, because he was not in the right place at the right time, has been labeled Doubting Thomas in Europe and America. When pastors, trying to uphold a dogmatic faith, need an easy target, Thomas is right handy in the Gospel of John. And yet once a year your pastor gets to preach in praise of Thomas. It happens on the second Sunday of Easter, the Sunday of Saint Thomas for many in both the Eastern Orthodox and Western Christian churches. Actually, there are three other feast days for Thomas….
Like many of you I don’t venerate saints and I don’t observe feast days, but I like old Thomas the Twin. I like him both for his reasonable doubts and for his extraordinary ministry. In part that's because the South Indian Christian in me remembers the longer story—and remembers a Thomas faith—a trust—a conviction, a calling that was beyond doubt, and beyond belief.
Growing up in the south of India, I learned that our neighbors, Mar Thoma Christians, trace their heritage back to this mysterious figure from whom they received faith. They remember St. Thomas the martyr, said to have given his life for his faith on the little hill known ever since as the “Thomas Mount” in what is now Chennai, on the coast of the Bay of Bengal. In these decades after the end of colonial rule, in an independent India often subject to political leaders who ride the crest of Hindu fundamentalism, Thomas is a reminder to the tiny minority Indian Christians that their faith goes back to the first generation of the movement! Long before the protestant missionaries who came with the British and Portuguese colonizers, Christianity was an Indian religion.
II.
It seems a shame that western Christianity remembers only--and often derides--"Doubting Thomas", and not the depth nor the distance traveled because of Thomas’s love and trust in the risen Christ. This spiritual power, this commitment beyond belief, compelled Thomas on a journey to the outer edge of the world as Romans and Jews knew it. It led him first out on the edge of the old Alexandrian empire, to Kerala on the western coast of India, where back then the kings still spoke Aramaic, and there was a thriving Jewish community. And then he was called on around to the eastern coast, on beyond language and custom and anything safe at all.
I used to read the gospel story of Thomas as about overcoming doubt, overwhelming doubt with the evidence of Christ’s nail pierced hands and side, only then to challenge the rest of us to faith with no evidence. But these days I look at Thomas and I wonder about the false division between faith and doubt!
Sometimes the deepest doubters are the most thoughtful affirmers. So often the ones who pose honest questions to received or conventional wisdomare exactly the ones we need to help us find our way. The apostle who traveled the farthest off the beaten path was the one who had asked the hard questions at the very beginning, then embraced his faith fully and without reservation.
What we call doubt was an essential component in how Thomas first met the risen Christ. We Christians have long tended to see doubt and belief as opposites—or as incompatible. But without doubt, faith is not only incomplete: it is unreasonable and prone to dogmatism and even mental tyranny. Without doubt, faith just does what it is told. Without doubt, it is impossible to truly love.
III.
Doubt is the necessary corrective to false certainties; to unthinking orthodoxy; and to endlessly repeated trite half truth. But doubt is not just a corrective! What we caricature as doubt, is actually the questioning mind and soul. What we label negatively is the yearning of the human mind and soul to reach beyond what we know, beyond the old certainties, and imagine something greater. We call it doubt, but that’s imagination! That’s faith, that’s vision.
Doubt, at its best, is the imaginative desire to spot the hidden chaos in the false orderings of the powerful. Without doubt, there is no justice: everyone accused goes to jail. Without doubt there is no democracy. We all just do as we are told.
Doubt is the secret ingredient in personal repentance. Doubt is the capacity to spot our own mistakes and the creative imagination to correct them.
Doubt is what allows us to read scripture with fresh eyes—doubting the interpretations of the past, we insist on bringing reason and our hearts, our best thinking, best knowledge, deepest yearnings to wrestle with the bible, discovering gleaming moments of liberation where before we only could spot the inky chains of past captivity.
It is the capacity to question, the gift of wonder, the ability to spot hypocrisy, the ability to creatively rearrange—all this we hide and deride in that one word: doubt. And it is these things we need, this doubt that is necessary, if we are in the long haul going to harvest a new kind of faith out of the rubble of the old, a new way of life that is about love instead of control; setting free instead of holding down; continued revelation instead of a closed book. We need the questions and we need the capacity to trust too, if we are to move beyond unthinking belief to a creative conviction, and a deep discipleship to the One who heals wounds, brings together enemies, ends wars, makes justice.
IV.
We have a visitor today whose life has already involved a long journey…Jazmin will share some of that with us after church. It is a journey three of us will trace in reverse this July, as Jonathan and Lynn and I take a brief trip to Cali, Colombia, to meet for a week with others with a deep concern for peace, and healing. An unlikely band of activists and preachers, youth and retirees, women and men, is about to come together there from around the world. We will meet the kind of Christians who have doubted the stories they have been told by their traditional leaders.
We will spend a week in conversation with people from Cali, from Mexico, from Europe, from the US and Canada, and even from the far east—the kind of people who believe that walking in the Jesus path means speaking some truth, who are convinced that love really is more powerful than death. And one way and another, we will come back here again—to rejoin you on that same pilgrimage of joy and justice, right here in Schenectady and Rotterdam, Glenville and Albany.
Without wonder and imagination and the courage to challenge and question, faith isn’t fully faith. You and I are called to imaginative dreams, creative courageous action, profound love, not shallow certainties. We are invited to live the love of the resurrected Jesus in ways that go beyond belief. We are challenged be responsive, attentive to a Spirit. We are summoned not to blunted belief but to sharp, sharp love.
Our lives are a pilgrimage. Sometimes the roadmap is more clear, sometimes less. But the invitation remains. God remains. Love remains. And when the day is done, we will find ourselves lifted by this great love, and transported to a most unexpected place. We will find ourselves having communion, bread and wine, with all humanity, the whole creation. This pilgrimage is real, it is joyful…and it is all about love. It is worth undertaking, not because it brings us to Malabar nor Maceio, Chennai nor Cali, but because it brings us to humanity, and it brings us to love. For wherever we love—there is home.
______
Graphic: "Tharisapalli Plates" from a land grant made in Kerala, India to Nestorian Priests from Syria, 849 c.e. Public domain under Indian copyright law, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Tharisapalli_plates#/media/File:Tharisappalli_copper_plates.jpg
Emmanuel Friedens CHurch
April 28, 2019
I.
They say he arrived in India around the year 52, in our era. Already he had been spreading the faith in Syria. In India he gained a reputation with princes as a master builder. That was his day job. But, for the people, his achievement was not buildings but the founding of new houses of faith. He died at the hands of violent men, on orders from an angry king. He died as he had lived, giving witness to the Teacher who sent him.
His name was Thomas—Thomas the Twin, Didymus in Greek. One of the original Twelve. Far from his home, he was the founder of the Christianity in India. The Christian population of Sri Lanka— recently targeted in numerous terror attacks-- also remember him as their founder.
Thomas the apostle, last of the apostles to believe, because he was not in the right place at the right time, has been labeled Doubting Thomas in Europe and America. When pastors, trying to uphold a dogmatic faith, need an easy target, Thomas is right handy in the Gospel of John. And yet once a year your pastor gets to preach in praise of Thomas. It happens on the second Sunday of Easter, the Sunday of Saint Thomas for many in both the Eastern Orthodox and Western Christian churches. Actually, there are three other feast days for Thomas….
Like many of you I don’t venerate saints and I don’t observe feast days, but I like old Thomas the Twin. I like him both for his reasonable doubts and for his extraordinary ministry. In part that's because the South Indian Christian in me remembers the longer story—and remembers a Thomas faith—a trust—a conviction, a calling that was beyond doubt, and beyond belief.
Growing up in the south of India, I learned that our neighbors, Mar Thoma Christians, trace their heritage back to this mysterious figure from whom they received faith. They remember St. Thomas the martyr, said to have given his life for his faith on the little hill known ever since as the “Thomas Mount” in what is now Chennai, on the coast of the Bay of Bengal. In these decades after the end of colonial rule, in an independent India often subject to political leaders who ride the crest of Hindu fundamentalism, Thomas is a reminder to the tiny minority Indian Christians that their faith goes back to the first generation of the movement! Long before the protestant missionaries who came with the British and Portuguese colonizers, Christianity was an Indian religion.
II.
It seems a shame that western Christianity remembers only--and often derides--"Doubting Thomas", and not the depth nor the distance traveled because of Thomas’s love and trust in the risen Christ. This spiritual power, this commitment beyond belief, compelled Thomas on a journey to the outer edge of the world as Romans and Jews knew it. It led him first out on the edge of the old Alexandrian empire, to Kerala on the western coast of India, where back then the kings still spoke Aramaic, and there was a thriving Jewish community. And then he was called on around to the eastern coast, on beyond language and custom and anything safe at all.
I used to read the gospel story of Thomas as about overcoming doubt, overwhelming doubt with the evidence of Christ’s nail pierced hands and side, only then to challenge the rest of us to faith with no evidence. But these days I look at Thomas and I wonder about the false division between faith and doubt!
Sometimes the deepest doubters are the most thoughtful affirmers. So often the ones who pose honest questions to received or conventional wisdomare exactly the ones we need to help us find our way. The apostle who traveled the farthest off the beaten path was the one who had asked the hard questions at the very beginning, then embraced his faith fully and without reservation.
What we call doubt was an essential component in how Thomas first met the risen Christ. We Christians have long tended to see doubt and belief as opposites—or as incompatible. But without doubt, faith is not only incomplete: it is unreasonable and prone to dogmatism and even mental tyranny. Without doubt, faith just does what it is told. Without doubt, it is impossible to truly love.
III.
Doubt is the necessary corrective to false certainties; to unthinking orthodoxy; and to endlessly repeated trite half truth. But doubt is not just a corrective! What we caricature as doubt, is actually the questioning mind and soul. What we label negatively is the yearning of the human mind and soul to reach beyond what we know, beyond the old certainties, and imagine something greater. We call it doubt, but that’s imagination! That’s faith, that’s vision.
Doubt, at its best, is the imaginative desire to spot the hidden chaos in the false orderings of the powerful. Without doubt, there is no justice: everyone accused goes to jail. Without doubt there is no democracy. We all just do as we are told.
Doubt is the secret ingredient in personal repentance. Doubt is the capacity to spot our own mistakes and the creative imagination to correct them.
Doubt is what allows us to read scripture with fresh eyes—doubting the interpretations of the past, we insist on bringing reason and our hearts, our best thinking, best knowledge, deepest yearnings to wrestle with the bible, discovering gleaming moments of liberation where before we only could spot the inky chains of past captivity.
It is the capacity to question, the gift of wonder, the ability to spot hypocrisy, the ability to creatively rearrange—all this we hide and deride in that one word: doubt. And it is these things we need, this doubt that is necessary, if we are in the long haul going to harvest a new kind of faith out of the rubble of the old, a new way of life that is about love instead of control; setting free instead of holding down; continued revelation instead of a closed book. We need the questions and we need the capacity to trust too, if we are to move beyond unthinking belief to a creative conviction, and a deep discipleship to the One who heals wounds, brings together enemies, ends wars, makes justice.
IV.
We have a visitor today whose life has already involved a long journey…Jazmin will share some of that with us after church. It is a journey three of us will trace in reverse this July, as Jonathan and Lynn and I take a brief trip to Cali, Colombia, to meet for a week with others with a deep concern for peace, and healing. An unlikely band of activists and preachers, youth and retirees, women and men, is about to come together there from around the world. We will meet the kind of Christians who have doubted the stories they have been told by their traditional leaders.
We will spend a week in conversation with people from Cali, from Mexico, from Europe, from the US and Canada, and even from the far east—the kind of people who believe that walking in the Jesus path means speaking some truth, who are convinced that love really is more powerful than death. And one way and another, we will come back here again—to rejoin you on that same pilgrimage of joy and justice, right here in Schenectady and Rotterdam, Glenville and Albany.
Without wonder and imagination and the courage to challenge and question, faith isn’t fully faith. You and I are called to imaginative dreams, creative courageous action, profound love, not shallow certainties. We are invited to live the love of the resurrected Jesus in ways that go beyond belief. We are challenged be responsive, attentive to a Spirit. We are summoned not to blunted belief but to sharp, sharp love.
Our lives are a pilgrimage. Sometimes the roadmap is more clear, sometimes less. But the invitation remains. God remains. Love remains. And when the day is done, we will find ourselves lifted by this great love, and transported to a most unexpected place. We will find ourselves having communion, bread and wine, with all humanity, the whole creation. This pilgrimage is real, it is joyful…and it is all about love. It is worth undertaking, not because it brings us to Malabar nor Maceio, Chennai nor Cali, but because it brings us to humanity, and it brings us to love. For wherever we love—there is home.
______
Graphic: "Tharisapalli Plates" from a land grant made in Kerala, India to Nestorian Priests from Syria, 849 c.e. Public domain under Indian copyright law, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Tharisapalli_plates#/media/File:Tharisappalli_copper_plates.jpg