With our routines and world upended by the Shelter in Place Order earlier this week that affects all of California, we are looking for ways to stay connected during a mandate to physically stay apart from one another. I have been blessed to spend Lent providing pulpit supply to Grace Community Church in North Fork, CA, and this is a continuation of our time together, even though we’re in different spaces.
Prelude Meditation
O Sacred Head – J.S. Bach
Performed by Scott Horton, Organist, First Congregational Church of Fresno
Opening Hymn • Alleluia! Sing to Jesus
Psalm 16:5-11 • Page 730, Chalice Hymnal
The Lord is my chosen portion and my cup;
you hold my lot.
The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places:
I have a goodly heritage.
I bless the Lord who gives me counsel;
in the night also my heart instructs me.
I keep the Lord always before me;
because God is at my right hand, I shall not be moved.
Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices;
my body also rests secure.
For you do not give me up to Sheol,
or let your faithful one see the Pit.
You show me the path of life.
In your presence there is a fullness of joy;
in your right hand are pleasures, forevermore.
Special Music • Doubting Thomas–Chris Thile
Video should automatically start at 1:29, if it does not, skip to that point to skip the banter.
Holy Scripture
Lay Leader: Mary Beth Harrison
Our many voices keep us in community with one another during this time. If you are interested in recording a reading of next week’s scripture, please email me.
Children’s Time
Activities for Children Pg 1 Pg 2
Church at Prayer
All are invited to email me prayer requests for next week’s prayer, or to get in touch any time during the week. We are in the midst of an unprecidented global event, and I am available as a compassionate ear if you find you need to talk through what’s going on.
Due to the public nature of worship and prayers online, prayer requests will be vague on the video recording to respect privacy and confidentiality, trusting that God knows our intention.
Hymn • We Walk by Faith
Sermon
Sermon Transcript
My dad is a storyteller. Anyone who has ever met him has probably been taken in by one of his jokes with a reaaaaalllllllly long wind-up. Sometimes, the punchline doesn’t immediately become obvious. Not for a few decades anyway. There have been situations where he has told entire groups of people that he helped co-write the song “Here Comes the Sun,” thinking that they would figure out that he was pulling their leg, only to discover that several years later they had been telling everyone that they knew the guy who helped pen the classic Beatles song. He even had my sister and I convinced when we were kids that we had an older brother who they’d had to send away because of his bad behavior, and did we want to end up like him? We finally figured out when we were in middle school that this was all a ruse to get us to behave. MIDDLE SCHOOL.
Naturally, growing up with a lover of tall tales and practical jokes, doubt is a language I am very fluent in. Questioning everything that seems slightly suspect is part of the process of moving through the world. When I read about Thomas, it is with a pretty strong filter of, “I totally get you, friend”.
Thomas is remembered as the guy who not only wasn’t there the first time that Jesus came around, but then he also was like, “Yeah, no. I’m gonna need some proof.” when his fellow disciples told him what he’d missed. Maybe Thomas also had a dad whose true stories were indistinguishable from the tall tales.
With the world the way it is for us right now, it’s easier to empathize with this part of the Easter story. Again, the theme of being locked away from a world too dangerous to go out in hits home in a way that we never experienced. While we aren’t hiding out from local authorities, our doors are locked and our homes are sealed off from outsiders at this time. If we venture out, it is one representative of the family, and it’s to run to the grocery store or to Lowes to pick up a part because our toilet has chosen NOW as the time to start leaking all over the bathroom floor. Thomas was probably the representative, the one who was doing the practical work of standing in the line at Costco and coming back with toilet paper, Lysol and top ramen to get the group through their social distancing. While he was taking on the risk of slipping out, Jesus showed up. Can you imagine coming back home, pulling your mask off, dropping the goods on the table and while you’re washing your hands, everyone converges on you saying “BROOOOOO, You just missed the most EPIC thing!”
I wouldn’t just be filled with doubt, I’d be mad and hurt.
Th next week, 8 whole days later, Jesus comes back. This time Thomas is home. The door is still locked. Jesus appears in the room, and opens again with “Peace be with you.”
After a week of uncertainty, of the initial ouch of being left out, one wonders how this greeting of peace washed over Thomas. Thomas, who had been left out and had been wading in those vulnerable human emotions of missing out on an experience that everyone else was talking about endlessly, unable to let go of his welling and growing grief.
Jesus then offers Thomas concrete proof. Touch my hands, feel my sides.
We don’t have evidence that Thomas actually needed to do this, we don’t have an account of Thomas looping his fingers through Jesus’s holes in his hands, even though I think that’s what we always imagine him doing. Immediately Thomas responds with “My Lord and my God!” He is the first of the apostles to proclaim the divinity of Christ. Skeptical as he was starting out, Thomas was the first in this story (because remember the women fell and worshiped at his feet in our scripture last week). There is something to the process of examination of what is before us and entertaining doubt.
Actually, there’s a pretty big something to that process. As I was sitting in my UCC Polity class on Tuesday of this week, this scripture from John bouncing around my mind from an earlier reading, the discussion of our own United Church of Christ theology began to resonate with this story of Thomas and his doubt. Not because I began having a crisis of faith right there in the middle of a Zoom session, though after 6 hours of sitting in zoom classrooms this is not far from the realm of possibility. It resonated because our discussion was tapping into doubt as a faithful practice.
When we study scripture, do we do it for confirmation of what we already know, or is it to expand, challenge ourselves, and grow in our faith? Sometimes we will come up against a new situation that will push our belief to the limits. Doubt is the fire under us that insists we dig deeper, doubt is the one who hands us our Sherlock Holmes cap and magnifying glass, doubt is the pebble in our shoe that we cannot live comfortably with until we’ve dealt with it. In the book, The Evolution of a UCC Style, Randi Jones Walker describes this as the “irritation of doubt,” and this is what spurs us forward into action, as we grapple with issues that come up. Walker then says of this, “In the process of this active thought both in mind and body, we come to a new or deeper understanding or belief that takes into account the new situation. This new or deeper or more complex belief becomes the foundation of new habits.” (Walker, 93). Doubt is the catalyst that keeps us from utter stagnation in our faith.
That same day, Rev. Daniel Ross-Jones, an Associate Conference Minister for the Northern California Nevada Conference and the instructor of the UCC Polity course, put into words what I had been grappling with in regards to the holy role of doubt as a spiritual practice. He said, “The opposite of belief is not doubt. It is certainty.”
WHAT.
Though Jesus’ other apostles had seen him first, Thomas was unwilling to quite give in to something he hadn’t done his due diligence with. He never stopped believing in Jesus, if he had, why return to the house with everyone else and sit through an insufferable 8 days of hearing everyone else’s commentary about it. We’re all on lockdown right now, we know how circular conversations can get when we aren’t going out into the world. My daughter told me three times yesterday about how she had watched Thor Ragnarok at her dad’s house. While Marvel movies are cool and all, can you imagine how much COOLER it would have been to have Jesus just show up? That’s all anyone would have gone on about. Thomas stayed, he knew who he was a disciple of and why. His belief never faltered, however, having missed this experience had gnawed at him. He pondered it. He wrestled with it, and when Jesus appeared to him, he had done all the mental work necessary in that 8 days to proclaim, “My Lord and my God!” on sight!
We are in a time of intense change. Things are not lining up with what we’ve always believed, whether it’s about who we are as a society, or about the safety net of being an American, or even the presence of the physical church as a constant and unchangeable certainty. If you are wrestling with doubt, if you have questions for God, if you are upset that none of this fits with where you thought your spring would be going, take comfort in knowing that you are not in opposition to belief. You are doing the active work of believing. If we don’t stop to critically look at how God fits in when times get weird we have no way of carrying our sacred texts and traditions and teachings with us into a new era.
A passive faith, packed with certitude and resting smugly in our own right-ness is not the call we receive as Christ-followers. We are tasked with bringing Christ’s relevance with us from one time of trial to the next. This is how we can continue to be the church while the world is changing. This is what makes us elastic enough to not snap when we are being pulled at by challenges. This week, as you notice that familiar irritation of doubt, take a deep breath and ask what God is saying to you. May your faith be ever deepened by your blessed doubts.
Closing Hymn • Crown Him With Many Crowns
This morning’s virtual worship was created for the wonderful folks of Grace Community Church in North Fork, CA. I am providing pulpit supply and have completely fallen in love with this church. If you came to this via some other source and received blessing by what was presented here today I would like to ask you to consider sending a donation to Grace. Like everywhere else, churches are being hit hard by this disruption to our usual way of life. Thank you!
Checks can be mailed to:
Grace Community Church
C/O Rene Horton
P.O. Box 368
Auberry, CA 93602
Busy Little Sunshine 