Sermon for 2nd Easter
Thomas, the New Normal?
By The Rev. Eric Christopher Shafer -
In the Lutheran church, as in most other churches, we follow a set calendar of lessons through the year. They come in a three year cycle, so that you do not hear the same lesson, for most Sundays, you so not hear the same lesson again for three years.
There are, of course, exceptions to this cycle of different lessons each Sunday for three years. You will always hear the gospel report of Jesus’ resurrection on Easter Sunday, for example. And the story of Jesus’ birth on Christmas Eve. No surprise there.
And then there is this Sunday, the Sunday after Easter Sunday which we call the Second Sunday of Easter. On this particular Sunday we hear the story of the disciple with the sad nickname, “Doubting Thomas.” Every year at this time we hear the same story, the one you have just heard me read, of how Thomas, who for some reason is not present with the other disciples when they meet with Jesus on the evening of that first Easter Sunday, of how Thomas, when he encounters Jesus on the following Sunday evening wants proof. Thomas needs to SEE Jesus in person, to touch him, to feel his wounds. Only then, the texts always tells us, will Thomas believe. And there is always that kicker, “blessed are those who do not see and yet still believe.”
As you can imagine, I have preached on this text quite a few times, since it comes around every year on this Sunday. Most preachers have. And most of us preachers have followed a familiar pattern: we have either preached on the traditional view of Thomas, “Doubting Thomas,” praising those, like you and me, who have not seen Jesus and yet still believe, or we have preached on a theme which is almost the opposite. That doubt is a good thing, a human thing, that faith without doubt, without questioning, is dead. In these sermons we preachers have held up Thomas in his doubts and questions, suggesting that it is healthy for us Christians to question our beliefs because our questioning makes our faith in God even stronger.
And both of these are good sermon directions and have served our faith well in years past. We must believe without seeing Jesus in the flesh, so to speak, and our questions and doubts are not only okay, they lead us into a deeper faith.
This year, in light of what we are all living through right now as we stay “safer-at-home,” this year I wonder something else. We tend to think of Thomas in terms of his doubting, but what if that doubt were part of a larger insistence on dealing with reality, on getting things back to normal, on moving forward now that the worst has happened?
Why isn’t Thomas in the upper room when Jesus makes his first appearance? Maybe it’s because, unlike the other disciples who are hiding behind locked doors, maybe it is becauseThomas has already accepted what has happened, has moved on, and is now out and about rebuilding his life from the fractured pieces that were left to him after the horrific events of Good Friday.
We know that Thomas prefers things that are clear and concrete: Earlier in John’s Gospel we hear Thomas challenging Jesus’ lofty words about going on ahead of them, saying bluntly, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” (John 14:5). And we know Thomas has courage – he is, after all, the one who just a few Sundays ago urged the disciples to go to Jerusalem with Jesus even if it spells their deaths (John 11:16).
Perhaps Thomas had already moved on by that first Easter evening, or at least was attempting to, attempting to put things back in order and get back to normal.
I think this may be also why it is so hard for Thomas to accept the testimony of his friends when they tell Thomas “We have seen the Lord.” Keep in mind that Thomas had seen his Lord recently also – on Friday – and what he saw was horrific, Jesus nailed to a cross in agony and isolation. The joyful confession of the other disciples probably seemed like just wishful thinking to this hardboiled realist.
So, when Thomas does see his Lord a week or so later, I think his noticeable change in tune is less about simply coming to faith and more about realizing that, after the resurrection, reality itself had changed and there would be no normal to go back to.
Think of it - how do you even talk about “normal” when someone has been raised from the dead? Someone has been raised from the dead!
What can possibly be the same? Your work, your sense of meaning, your relationships, your purpose, your view of past, present, and future – all of it is changed by God’s act of resurrection.
So when Thomas confesses “My Lord and my God,” he is abandoning all his conceptions of “normal” and opening himself to a very different reality than he could have previously imagined because creation is not static but is still happening. Similarly, when Jesus affirms but also stretches his testimony – “Do you believe because you’ve seen…” – and then blesses later believers – “blessed are those who believe and have not seen” – Jesus is simultaneously challenging and inviting and blessing all of us to recognize that, in light of the resurrection, the future is always open.
The future is always open. Or, perhaps in better words for these days, the future is still open.
It is easy for all of us right now to get stuck on “how soon will we can get back to normal?” but, perhaps, the question should be “what will we be free to do, try, and be in this ‘new normal’?”
These days I think of the coming “new normal” often in terms of our congregation. What will we carry forward with us from the “interim” steps we took with regard to worshiping, connecting, teaching, serving and more? What part of our old patterns seem suddenly not just non-essential but perhaps not even that helpful in light of our new sense of mission?
This may be the chance for all of us to turn outward and recognize the painful but essential levelling effect of the coronavirus, helping to make us all realize that we are all – as individuals, congregations, communities, countries, and humanity – that we are all bound to each other and dependent on one another.
The future is still open. God is still at work creating, re-creating, and sustaining us to do things we could not have imagined previously.
None of this is as easy as it sounds. Part of Thomas died when he saw the Risen Lord. Died to his old beliefs, died to his sense of reality, died to his deepest convictions about himself and the world. Perhaps Thomas’ exclamation, “My Lord and my God” was as much an agonized and bewildered cry as it was a joyful confession.
And, like Thomas, our shift to the “new normal” will likely not be normal for us either. It may be similarly painful.
God is leading us from one reality, a “back to normal” reality, to another reality, a “there is no normal” reality. And the good news in these confusing times is that Jesus is there amid the necessary changes and faithful adaptations we will have to do, Jesus is there, here, calling us forward, blessing us to believe though we do not see, and promising to be with us and for us forever.
The future is still open. The future is always open. Whatever is our new normal, we can be certain that Jesus will be with us and for us in it. With us and for us forever.
Amen.
(Thanks to the Rev. Dr. David Lose whose work I used for this sermon).
The Rev. Eric Christopher Shafer
Senior Pastor - Mt. Olive Lutheran Church
Santa Monica, California
April 19, 2020
