Faithful Thomas (John 20:19-31)

image: "Thomas Inspecting Jesus's Wounds" © He Qi

This sermon was originally preached on April 7, 2024, Low Sunday,  at Gethsemane Lutheran Church in Hopkins, MN.

The livestream of our service may be viewed here (with video the excerpted sermon at the end of this entry).
Today's Gospel text is John 20:19-31.

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Peace be with you, beloved of God. 

This morning we get to peek into the mind, body, and heart of a man who’s been veiled in a very particular reputation over the millennia since Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection. We all know him as “Doubting Thomas,” and in all honesty I was not thrilled to preach about the disciple I was taught never to be like but who I seemed to mirror anyway, in all the wrong ways. I’ve always doubted and always wanted proof because my faith has never been an easy blessing but something I’ve worked out in such fear and trembling that I was well into my 20s before I permitted myself to entertain what author David Dark calls “the sacredness of questioning everything.” It took a few more years after that to lose god altogether, which I did, about nine years ago. And when I tell you I lost god, I mean it in the most literal sense: In the midst of the asking some of the heaviest and hardest questions of my life about evil and suffering and why God never did anything about the world’s unmitigated grief and violence, I woke up one morning with an overwhelming clarity that it was because, simply, there is no god. It’s not that I stopped believing, but that god had never existed to begin with. And my life was a lie. 

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