Doubting Thomas: A Disciple We Can Believe In! - Part II
[This is second sermon in a series of three that began with the honest doubts of Thomas, the Disciple.]
 
“Doubting Thomas: A Disciple We Can Believe In! –Part II”
Selected Passages from the Gospel of John and the Gospel of Thomas
April 6, 2008
Douglas S. Long
Umstead Park United Church of Christ
 
So…. last week I launched into a look at this wonderful disciple that has come to be known as “Doubting Thomas.” Don’t be frustrated if you weren’t here. No one who was remembers much of what I really said anyway… In fact, I had to go back and read my sermon myself to refresh my own memory.  (By the way, I plan to eventually get this series posted online, in case you might want to refresh your memories, too.)
 
Two women were discussing their pastors. One woman said, "My pastor is so good she can talk on any subject for an hour."
The other woman responded, "That's nothing. My pastor can talk for an hour without any subject at all."
 
The subject last week was Thomas… and us. Not so much “Doubting Thomas” as “Honest Thomas.”
As I tried to get my thoughts down on paper this week, the subject continued to expand. I now know that I will not finish my thoughts today and they will definitely be folded into next week and frankly, I’m beginning to wonder where this will eventually lead, because right now there are already more threads to this Doubting Thomas story… no, let’s do say “Honest Thomas” … “Honest Thomas” story than I can ever hope to follow. 
 
Why?…because in the doubts of Thomas we discover and acknowledge the honest dialogue of both past and present. In looking honestly at Thomas we literally unearth the diversity of the Early Church and acknowledge the diversity of Christian belief that is present still.
 
Whoa… Where did that come from?
 
Elaine Pagels… that’s where. "Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas" Those weren’t her words exactly but that's where she led me. I began to tell a part of her story last week. Let me refresh all of our memories.
 
Pagels is a professor of religion at Princeton University… and, like some of us, has been hanging around the Church, sometimes in, sometimes out, for several decades.
She loved her church as a child, a place where she was taught she belonged, when, as a teenager she realized that her ‘belonging’ meant that others were ‘excluded.’ This became most evident to her when a close friend was killed in an automobile accident. The leaders of her church sympathized with her grief, but also explained that since her friend had been Jewish, and therefore not ‘born again,’ the real tragedy was that he was eternally damned. The inclusion she has been a part of had high costs and the leaders of the church she attended directed their congregation not to associate with outsiders, except to convert them. Finding no room for discussion, Pagels left that church… for a time, she left the Church.
 
She studied religion. She studied it academically. …and she was good at this… seeing the institution from a distance. Still, something moved deep within her… restless and wanting.
And as a religious academic, her return to the church occurred years later… when she sought grounding in the midst of her 18 month old son’s terminal illness. He was her first born, and he was dying.
 
She turned back to the church… but not the church of her youth… to another experience of church. Slipping into a sanctuary of grace in the midst of her need, Pagels found herself within a congregation that expressed itself differently… in her words: “a community that had gathered to sing, to celebrate, to acknowledge common needs, and to deal with what we cannot control or imagine.” (p. 4.)
 
And in the process of that experience, she began to look at The faith, the Christian faith, and the statements of faith anew. She thought about the church of her youth and its rigid beliefs. She thought about her new community, with room to breathe and explore and be. “I am a historian of religion,” she explained, “and so, as I visited that church, I wondered when and how being a Christian became virtually synonymous with accepting a certain set of beliefs?” (p.5.)
(Some of you are remembering last week's sermon now?)
 
Is Christianity, at its core, about belief (a right set of beliefs), or about practice (how we live)?
Is it about doctrine or love?
Indeed, when, in the evolution of the Church, did “being a Christian become virtually synonymous with accepting a certain set of beliefs?”
 
What Pagels knew from her academic studies, was that there was a tremendous diversity of opinion in the earliest church, and that somehow, at some point, a large part of that diversity, that dialogue, was effectively suppressed.
 
I want to back up here a  moment… part of that dialogue is very much still in the Scriptures we have, but we, for the most part, are not aware of it… or we choose not to think carefully about it. Let me tell a story “on myself” to illustrate.
 
I was halfway through my first year at Wake Forest University (This was ‘a while back’!) and the Chaplain, Ed Christman, asked me if I would submit a meditation for a Lenten book of reflections the community was publishing. I was honored. Me, a freshman, asked to contribute to the publication! I was even more delighted when the story he assigned me was one of my favorites… the Trial of Jesus before Pilate. Now, the specific passage he assigned was the story as recorded in Mark’s Gospel … which is not nearly as dramatic as the way that the Gospel of John records it… so I said to heck with this Mark passage, I’m gonna write about what really happened! And so I wrote a passionate piece about how Pilate was on trial, not Jesus, which is what John presents (Pilate pacing back and forth between the crowds clamoring for crucifixion and Jesus standing, beaten down but standing, ...for truth. Pilate goes back and forth, back and forth between the two…) Pilate on trial and, my reflection was soaring, how ultimately, we are on trial because we have to choose between Jesus and the crowds around us, too.
… and in the midst of my passion I inferred, as the Gospel of John does, that it was the Jews who rejected Jesus. It was the Jews who had him crucified.
 
Now, looking back on all this, I see how the Chaplain and the editorial committee were in a quandary. First of all, you see, the booklet was designed to be meditations on The Gospel of  Mark, and the relative simplicity with which Mark presents the faith (If this was explained to me, I surely didn’t understand it. Why use a simple Markan version when John is so rich?! I wondered in my first year arrogance.)
…but write I did, and now the committee had an intense and compelling meditation, if I do say so myself, and didn’t want to squash its young source (me) by saying “You freshman DOLT, you've reflected on a passage from John, not Mark!”
And, true to John, I had implied the Jews were responsible for Jesus’ death.
So the committee apparently decided if they could just get me to soften that point, they would publish a Lenten book of meditations on Mark, in the middle of which there was a Johanine rant.
 
As a first year student in college, even as one who had already devoted quite a bit of time to Christian study and had been in church all my life, I had no awareness at all that Mark’s perspective of Jesus could, in any way, be considered separately from John’s.
 
In truth, as most of you are aware, the four Gospels we have in our New Testament each portray a unique perspective of Jesus. Many times they are complimentary, yet at other points they provide insight into the active and differing dialogue within the early Christian community.
 
From the very beginning, there has existed a breadth of belief, a wealth of understandings in Christianity.
           
Now, back to Pagels….
What Pagels knew from her academic studies, was that there was a tremendous diversity of opinion in the earliest church, a diversity that extended well beyond the four Gospels. She and some of her colleagues at Harvard had been sifting through a cache of writings unearthed in 1945 near the northern Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi (and thus the writings, some 12 parchments have become known as the Nag Hammadi writings.).
 
What the first followers of Jesus struggled with, among other specifics, was whether Jesus was like one of us. There was no shortage of opinion.
 
How do we understand the life of Jesus? Was he “one of us”? (Pagels 147ff.)   Are we not also created in the image of God?
 
Among the Nag Hammadi writings was a complete copy of a Gospel that heretofore only bits and pieces had been found. The Gospel of Thomas.
The Gospel of Thomas is a “Sayings Gospel,” which means it is comprised solely of statements attributed to Jesus. 114 sayings. Some are the same as those found in the four Gospels the NT embraces, while other of Thomas’s sayings are unique.
Obviously, it didn’t make it into the New Testament.
…But why not?
 
We are taught, those of us who grew up in the Church, Pagels explains wryly, to spot heresy from an early age. We come to respect the names of Irenaeus, one of the early Church Fathers …and we respect Irenaeus (even if we don’t really know much about him) because the title of ‘early Church Father’ carries such reverence with it,
… and it was Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons in 180 C.E., who had denounced such ‘secret writings’ as Thomas’s Gospel, “as an abyss of madness and blasphemy against Christ.” (p. 32)
 
Understandably then, we approach these ‘extra’ texts with complete suspicion.
Says Pagels, she “expected these recently discovered texts to be garbled, pretentious, and trivial. (p.32) Instead [she was] surprised to find in some of them unexpected spiritual power- such as her great surprise when she read this verse in the Gospel of Thomas:
 
“Jesus said ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.’”
 
What? Within each of us, an inner connection to God? Could Jesus have said that?
 
Again, from Pagels, “The strength of this saying is that it does not tell us what to believe but challenges us to discover what lies hidden within ourselves; and, with a shock of recognition, I realized that this perspective seemed to me self-evidently true.” (p. 32)
 
Self-evidently true…
Is it possible that, deep within us, there is truth that resonates with God?
More of what Thomas records as Jesus’ words:
 
3… "When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living [God]. But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty." 
5. Jesus said, "Know what is in front of your face, and what is hidden from you will be disclosed to you. For there is nothing hidden that will not be revealed."
 
In Thomas’s Gospel… Jesus encourages the hearer not so much to believe in Jesus, as to seek to know God through one’s own divinely given capacity, since all are created in the image of God. (p.34)  In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says that recognizing one’s affinity with God is key to the Kingdom of God.
 
Is that heresy? … or is it indeed Truth, but Truth too unwieldy to easily institutionalize?
More on that next week…. but, for now, I want to return to the Gospel according to John, and the disciple Thomas’s words there:
 
"Unless I see the nail holes in his hands, put my finger in the nail holes, and stick my hand in his side, I won't believe it."                                                        (John 20:25, The Message)
 
All he did was state the obvious. Dead folks don’t get out of the grave. I’d have been with Thomas on that one.
 
How did the earliest followers understand Jesus and what his life meant? Who did they say he was …and were there dissenters? Were the early Christians’ beliefs uniform and in lock step agreement with one another?
 
To answer this, what insight might we gain from our own experience? Or is it inappropriate to factor our own experience of life in at all?
 
This past Friday marked the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.  Hard to believe that he has been dead more years now than he lived.
…but, and I ask this question in all seriousness, is King really dead?
 
Certainly, there is a spirit that survives, a spirit that fuels the passion of many for equality and non-violence… for peace.
I read a most remarkable and insightful portion of Richard Lischer’s homily delivered at the National Cathedral on Friday. Mr. Lischer teaches at Duke Divinity School and a portion of his remarks were printed in Friday’s N&O. Perhaps some of you read them, too.
Said Lischer:
“When you enter the undercroft of Dexter Avenue King Memorial Church in Montgomery, Ala., you are confronted by an unusual work of art. It is a mural depicting Martin Luther King Jr.'s ascension into heaven. He is barefoot and dressed in an oatmeal-colored robe. He is surrounded by the mothers and fathers of the church and other saints. He is clearly on the rise to meet God.
Today, on the 40th anniversary of his assassination, many newspapers will carry the fateful photograph of King's body crumbled on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, his friends daubing his wounds or pointing toward the source of the shot and crying for help.
If an outside observer were to ask, "Which is the real Martin Luther King? Is it the body on the balcony, or the rising spirit of a great-souled leader?" today the church of God responds, "It is the spirit rising. The spirit of King endures not only in the memory of the nation but, like all the saints, in the kingdom of heaven." For the truest end of humankind is not survival but the blessedness that sees God.”
… the blessedness that sees God.
The honest Thomas within me resonates joyously with that.
 
So may it be.
Amen.
.