April 27, 2003 - Second Sunday of Easter
Acts 4:32-35
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John 20:19-31
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“Life Together – Without a Doubt?”

“Do not doubt, but believe.” That’s a tall order that Jesus gives to Thomas, and Thomas stands for all of us, by the way. There was Jesus, risen from the dead, in the glorified body that allowed him to do amazing things, like walk through locked doors, and Thomas still couldn’t bring himself to believe. Know what, we’re still in the same situation and we still have to come to the place where Thomas was, and it’s all right to be there. Otherwise, would the church really be the church, would we really have life together without a doubt?

For some reason we have the idea that unless our faith and our understanding are without questions, without a doubt, then we’re somehow defective. If we can’t be “just simple believers” then somehow we’re spiritually immature. Well, I’m sorry, because I’ve been a believer pretty much all of my life and I just don’t see it that way. I think Jesus told Thomas not to doubt, but to believe because Jesus knows that we can’t believe unless we’ve first doubted. Plato said that the “unexamined life isn’t worth living” and I hold to the idea that the unquestioned faith isn’t worth believing and certainly isn’t about to become the source for a meaningful live together in community.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, wrote to a young protégé:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them . . . the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer. [Letters to a Young Poet]

You see our doubts allow us to grow into our faith; and our questions become the source for our answers. So we need to live our doubts, live our questions, and then we will live our faith.

Now that’s where the church, the community of faith gathered in covenant relationship, comes into play. The church provides the forum, the playing field as it were, where we can begin to live the doubts and deepen in faith. The Church is to be the place where I can open myself without the fear of someone whacking me, belittling me, or scoffing at my questions, or my doubts. It is when I am in worship, or when I am here in fellowship, or gathered with others in study, that I am safe to be who I am – warts, doubts, and all.

The Church, then, is the place where, even with our doubts, we can share a commonality, be, as it was said in the Acts, “of one heart and soul.” The Church has rarely exhibited that experience of life together, of community, which we see in Acts, but that is what we’re supposed to be for one another. The community that early group of believers experienced was the result of grace. They were able to open their hearts to one another, even open their possessions to one another, not because of a rule or because they had been “guilted” into it. Rather, it came because they had shared a powerful encounter with the Risen Lord and their life together flowed naturally from it. This is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer described in his wonderful little book Life Together.

What determines our brotherhood is what that man is by reason of Christ. Our community with one another consists solely in what Christ has done to both of us. This is true not merely at the beginning, as though in the course of time something else were to be added to our community; it remains so for all the future and to all eternity. I have community with others and I shall continue to have it only through Jesus Christ. The more genuine and the deeper our community becomes, the more will everything else between us recede, the more clearly and purely will Jesus Christ and his work become the one and only thing that is vital between us. We have one another only through Christ, but through Christ we do have one another, wholly, and for all eternity. [Life Together, p. 14.]

When we’re together, when we’re showing love for one another then there is Christ and there is Christ’s body, the Church – no doubt about it.

One of the reasons we Congregationalists are able to handle the diversity of theological opinions within our communities of faith is our emphasis upon the living and lived encounter. One can ascribe to a set of doctrines, give lipservice to a creedal statement, and still not be sharing life and faith with others. We realize, or at least we’re working at realizing, that our life together is made possible by our willingness to bear with one another, even when someone is going through some doubts on concepts that to some of us are absolutely foundational to faith. The covenant concept is what allows us to keep these values in healthy tension. As individuals can come into covenant relationship with each other, despite widely diverse backgrounds, experiences, and positions, so, too can Churches and this is the basis of our wider fellowship. There is a neglected, but terribly important document, The Report of A Study by the Committee on Free Church Polity and Unity. Published in 1954 after a four-year process, it spells out the genius of the Congregational Way and shows us the basis of our life together. This is what it says about the Church:

Congregationalism believes that the church is both local and universal. While the one aspect is not to be stressed at the expense of the other, Congregationalism has always been sensitively aware of the danger of losing sight of the completeness of the local church, which within itself compasses both the local and the universal. For that reason, while we have emphasized the fellowship (and it is fellowship in Christ), we have insisted on the fact of the autonomy of the local church. This complete autonomy is not a secular permit “to do as we please.” This autonomy rests upon a specific binding religious experience – a seeking of and a following of the guidance of the Holy Spirit by the people of this gathered church.

Congregational Christians do not set a doctrinal test as a condition of admission to the covenanting church. This fact is a recognition that no Christian has the right, under God, to exclude another Christian from the church because in his devotion to Christ and in his experience of Christ there are differences in the expression of that experience and devotion. The Congregational Christian Churches have felt that to impose such a test is to distort the relationship between a man and his God made known in Christ. But always the relation between the believers is the binding relationship of having covenanted together in Christ to be Christ’s men and women.

(Thus the congregational pattern does the difficult thing of keeping the door of Christian fellowship open to admit into one fellowship sincere followers of Christ between whom there may be wide differences of Christian experience and practice.) [pages 10-11]

Our churches have room for people at every stage of the journey, even a Thomas.

Thomas was only able to really come to believe once he was back with the community of the apostles. It’s no different for us – we need each other if we’re going to accomplish the goal of belief and of living community. Working with the community of faith is where we can heal our doubts, and other wounds as well. But, it only happens if we remain connected with the community of faith, we have to keep on keeping on if we’re going to accomplish the goal.

I would venture to say that all of us have reasons to give in to our doubts and our fears. There’s probably not a person here this morning who hasn’t dealt with illness, brokeness, problems with relationships, employment problems, name it. All of those feelings are real, and all of them can only be dealt with in a loving community – like this one. You see sisters and brothers, when we experience those hurts or feel those feelings we begin to wonder “where is God in all this?” We ask, “where is God in my suffering?” The truth is, God is there. We have to look, but God is there; right there in the midst of those hurts, that suffering, loving us through it; loving us through the words, the actions, the presence of a loving Church.

Fred Craddock is a man possessed with remarkable faith, delightful wit, and a real ability to preach. He wrote a little brochure for preachers and in it he says, “You will have a time when you will lose your faith. Don’t panic. Let the faith of the community carry you until you recover.” There’s truth there for all of us, not just us preacher-types. We may come up against stuff that will challenge and test us, but if we stay connected to the Church and let this community carry us along we’ll recover. It might take a while, but it will come, and soon we’ll be helping to carry someone else, which is as it should be.

I believe that Jesus’ words, “Do not doubt, but believe,” are an invitation to a lifetime of growth in the community of faith. It begins as we are made part of the Church through baptism. It continues as we enter more fully into that fellowship as a covenanted member of a particular Church. The growth is sustained as we are nourished by breaking the bread of the Word and are fed at the Lord’s sacramental table. It is here that we feel the breath of the Spirit and know that God is with us, that we are loved, and that we are the Church – without a doubt.