So many doubts and questions

 

Here’s a little sermon for the Sunday after Easter, using John 20: 19 - 31 

It’s very easy as we continue to lockdown to waste time! I was on Twitter on Monday and followed a conversation between parents of very little children about “In The Night Garden”. 

“Why do the Wottingers get so much less air time than the Pontipines?” 

”They’re hide and seek experts and need to hone their craft. Plus living next door to a family of 10 Pontipines in a semi detached must get on your wick, no?”

“Don’t get me started. I posted very similarly a couple of years back on how the ninkynonk is clearly inferior to the pinkyponk, yet gets all the eps.  There’s no justice.”

“Well done to the Wottingers for staying in, I say!”

Huge questions that need answering keep our heads spinning. We have time to worry about them. Each day we watch journalists ask big questions of political leaders. Some are answered. Others are fudged. There was an amazing press briefing with President Trump earlier this week. He turned on a woman who dared challenge him calling her a disgrace, and full of fake news. Our nightly briefing isn’t as heated. I have to say of all those who come out and brief us the most caring of them is Rishi Sunak. At least he doesn’t treat us like children and might care that this will be tough for a while yet. 

We ask questions of each other in our daily routine: 

“Do you want breakfast?”

“Is it time for lunch?”

“What are we having for dinner?”

“Have we got any biscuits?”

We should encourage questions and we should press those who are meant to answer them or at least tell us they don’t know the answer. Not asking questions can get us in a mess. At school I was so painfully shy I would never ask questions when I didn’t get it. So on school reports I would have written, “I wish Ian would ask for help if he is stuck!” I guess I thought I would look silly if everyone else got it and I didn’t. 

I love the poem by Steve Turner:

“Do you need to go to the toilet when you are dead?

Does God grow old?

Life is full of unanswered questions when you are five years old and late for school.”

I wonder what the disciples who’d seen Jesus in the upper room thought of Thomas. We are told “Thomas wasn’t there” when Jesus appeared to them for the first time. Where was he? I’ve always wondered that. 

Whatever, he is there later, and the other disciples are excited and want to tell him what he missed. He’s given a cruel nickname “doubting Thomas” but you know what, I think he’s great because he isn’t afraid to ask questions and be hesitant to believe. 

“Unless I see.... I will not believe.”

“Unless I see....” I need to see it myself. 

Sidney Carter wrote this a long time ago: 

”Your holy hearsay is not evidence
Give me the good news in the present tense
What happened nineteen hundred years ago
May not have happened
How am I to know?

The living truth is what I long to see 
I cannot lean upon what used to be
So shut the bible up and show me how
The Christ you talk about
Is living now.”

This hymn also is full of where Thomas is..

Don’t tell me of a faith that fears
To face the world around
Don’t dull my mind with easy thoughts
of grace without a ground.

Don’t speak of piety and prayers
Absolved from human need;
Don’t talk of spirit without flesh
Like harvest without seed.

Don’t sate my soul with common sense
Distilled from ages past
Inept for those who fear the world’s
about to breathe its last.

Don’t set the cross before my eyes
unless you tell the truth
of how the Lord, who finds the lost,
was often found uncouth.

So let the Gospel come alive
in actions plain to see
in imitation of the one
whose love extends to me.

I need to know that God is real!
I need to know that Christ can feel
the need to touch and love and heal
the world, including me.

I love the fact in this story that Jesus gives Thomas space to receive what he needs. The testimony of others isn’t enough. He needs to see Jesus alive for himself. He had invested too much in the Jesus project that it hurt him it was over. Remember when most of the disciples urged Jesus not to go to Jerusalem it was him who said “let us also go with him that we might die with him.” He wants to know it for himself. This could be a wind up. No one survives a brutal crucifixion like that. 

Jesus tells Thomas to see and to feel his wounds. Then he shouts out the first post resurrection statement of belief: “My Lord and my God!”

Sometimes people need time to believe something and more than that, they need to see why they should believe it. Thomas isn’t a weak disciple - he’s like me. He wants to sort it all out in his head before he can move on. 

I’m beginning to put together the first chapter of my book which is all about saints on our journey who’ve helped me to believe, through their example. The people who’ve been important in my faith development are the ones who’ve showed me what genuine Christianity is, have accepted me when I’ve had all sorts of questions, and have shown me Jesus through how they live. 

I remember the little plaque in the pulpit of the little church I grew up in. It said “Sir, we would see Jesus.” Reminding the preacher of his or her task to convince the congregation in front of them of the heart of the Gospel: Jesus alive! I never found   preaching at The Folly chapel easy as all of the gathered congregation were related to me! I’d get from my mother a post mortem:

“Why did you pick that hymn?”

“Why did you say that?!”

There are a lot of questions as this Covid-19 virus continues to spread. Being in what we will know by Sunday will be a longer lockdown is hard. I’ve struggled this week. The implications of having questions about moving and the future which cannot be answered is crippling. But all I want from those guiding us through this unprecedented crisis is honesty. 

Mr Johnson, when you are better, Mr Hancock, Mr Raab, and even Ms Patel if they dare bring her out again, please answer the question and if you cannot, don’t give me bluster, say you don’t know. Can we have Rishi Sunak every day? Please? 

What do I learn from this passage? That questions are okay. Let’s encourage each other to ask them. Let our churches be places of honest conversation and gentle patience with those who don’t get it yet... And let’s return to being communities which show those who are questioning by our deeds of the truth of the risen Jesus. There is so much in this crisis which is happening which is of God, as people care for each other. I pray it will be the norm when we are able to do what we did before we had to stay home.

For now, returning to where I started these thoughts, in the Night Garden there is a question that needs answering: 

“Who’s not in bed?”

“Iggle Piggle’s not in bed!”