With all of the excitement about things going on here at St. John’s last Sunday, I had made the conscious decision to break away from the lectionary to preach in support of our congregation’s goals, to hopefully give perspective on God’s point of view of what we were proposing and intending to do as a congregation. I hope I was successful in that endeavor, but one of the things that was lost in my doing that was our opportunity to once again revisit that famous story of the upper room on that first Easter Sunday and the story of the man who was absent that night, the disciple known as Thomas.

I once joked that I’ve preached more on Thomas than anyone else in the Bible. For a time that was true. When I was a lay preacher filling in for pastors on vacation, it was quite common for me to get a call to preach the Sunday after Easter, which meant I got to preach on Thomas a lot. And, of course, that remained true after you so graciously called me to be your ordained pastor almost eight years ago now.

I’ve always felt that Thomas gets a bad rap and I’ve often used these preaching opportunities to try to vindicate him. If an interviewer were to ask you which of the twelve you would most like to emulate, most of you I suspect would say “Peter,” or “John”, maybe “Matthew,” but I doubt Thomas would be high on anyone’s list. Why? He’s the doubter and that’s bad.

For hundreds of years, the church’s teaching has been “don’t be like Thomas” and “doubt is bad.” I’m going to turn all that on its head today. I say we should be more like Thomas. I saw that doubt is, in fact, a virtue. Something not necessarily to be encouraged, but certainly not to be ridiculed or looked down upon. My reasoning is simple. Doubt is what makes us question, doubt is what makes us seek, doubt is what makes us grow.

Too often we mistake doubt for unbelief. They are two very different things. Doubt is like an itch you can’t scratch. It gnaws at you, drives to find answers to the questions in your mind and your heart. Is God real? Did Christ rise from the dead? Does God love me? Is there life after death? We all struggle with questions like this from time to time. It’s natural, because there is so much about what God and Christ teach us that our minds just cannot grasp without help. So many experiences of the divine in our lives that make no sense to us. So we seek those answers because we do not know.

Unbelief, on the other hand, does know. Or thinks it does. Unbelief does not question. Unbelief does not seek. God isn’t real. Christ didn’t rise from the dead. God doesn’t love me. There is no life after death. Those are statements of unbelief. Defiantly certain. Do you see the difference? Doubt is our struggle with what we cannot believe. Unbelief is what we refuse to believe.

Thomas is a doubter, a questioner, a seeker. He was such long before that first Easter evening. The Gospel stories have several occasions that tell of Thomas being the one to raise the question when Jesus taught something confusing or cryptic (which of course he never does. /snark.) Thomas is also the one who convinced the others to follow Jesus to Jerusalem. His loyalty and love for Jesus is never in question.

I’ve often wondered why he was absent on that first Easter evening. Perhaps his doubt was gnawing at him even there, driving him into the streets in an effort to scratch that itch. Unbelief, on the other hand, is quite obvious in this story. It’s the other ten who are consumed with it, locked behind closed doors awaiting what they believe is their inevitable destruction. Their certainty of failure is all consuming. Then Christ comes into their midst and everything changes. They are proven wrong and are ecstatic at seeing Jesus alive.

Then they tell Thomas and suddenly it clicks. Thomas has what he needs to believe. “I need to see the scars,” he tells the others. “That’s the answer to my question.” A week later, Jesus comes again and gives him the very thing he asks for. Thomas has his questions answered, and he exclaims one of the greatest statements of faith recorded in the Scriptures. “My Lord and my God.”

Thomas’s doubt is not punished, it is rewarded. Sure, Jesus commends those who can believe without seeing, but he also gives Thomas what he needs to answer his questions.

For our part, we need to be more eager to embrace our doubt and not fear it. To stand up and face the challenge our questions provide for us. Why? For what reason? Doubt, question, and seek those answers. To be willing to say “hey, wait a minute…” when something doesn’t make sense. That’s how we grow. That’s how our faith is strengthened.

Unbelief, that’s what we should fear. And it is not merely a trait of atheists and people outside the four walls of the church. No, it is here too, stronger even within the church. We’ve seen it. When the church refuses to believe Christ’s teaching of mercy, that’s what produced the Inquisition. When the church refuses to believe Christ’s call to bring all people, regardless of color and background, to faith, that’s what produced the Crusades. Unbelief at its worst, our stubborn refusal to hear and believe Christ’s words. It’s still here. What does the church say about the wars in the Middle East? What does it say about homosexuality? Is it speaking Christ or is it speaking our refusal to believe in him?

There’s a reason Gandhi once famously said “I like your Christ, but I do not like your Christians.” We need more doubters to counter the unbelief in our midst. More questions. More seekers of the truth. Doubters are what make the church what it is meant to be. Thomas went from that upper room to the land of India to spread the Gospel. Missionaries came into those lands 1500 year later to convert what they thought would be heathens only to find the very churches Thomas founded centuries earlier still vibrant and alive in faith. That’s what a doubter’s faith produces.

Galileo was a doubter who challenged the church with his questions, challenged the unbelief that the universe God had created was what they said it was. Luther was a doubter who challenged the church with his questions, challenged the unbelief that salvation can bought and earned, our refusal to believe that the cross of Christ is a free gift to all. God smiles on ones such as these, for they are the ones who bring the church forward, who nurture its growth, who make it what it was meant to be. They are the ones who spread the faith and give hope to the lost. Doubters change the world.

What will you do when you get that itch? Will you question? Will you seek? Will you let the answers you find transform you? Will you grow from it? Thomas did, and so have so many others. And the church is all the better for it. God bless the doubters. Amen.