Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.

I have this pretty clear memory from maybe like age 8. We were living in Tennessee, we were attending St. John's Episcopal Church in Johnson City, and I think I kinda like grabbed my mom's arm and pulled her over to the staircase and I sat down on the third wooden step, and I mumbled out a question that was something like this: Mom, they told us about Adam & Eve at church and they told us about how we evolved from monkeys at school, and SIGH which one is right!? And I don't remember the words to her answer -- Mom if you're watching, I'll call you later, HAHA -- but I remember the feeling of her answer, which was oh that's fine, oh this is fine. It was like "oh this is not a scary question" or "oh these things are in competition with each other", in my adult words, I might've understood it as a child as "these are not two competing answers to the same question, these are two different answers to two different questions". It was, more than anything, not an occasion to suddenly pick a side: science or religion, bible or logic, belief or doubt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PQ3TFhCIdU

My work in ministry over the last ten years has been so significantly with people for whom doubt is a big, loud, persistent question -- in youth groups, at summer camp, in campus ministry, with people who have come back to the church after having never thought church could be an option for them again. There are Christian traditions in which doubt is scolded and certainty is normalized. There are Christian traditions and Christian leaders who treat doubt as a series of questions that are not worth asking, and on the other side leaders who breeze past doubt as a source of pain or confusion or longing or curiosity, in the attempt to normalize it.

I feel like it is worth wondering aloud, though, when we talk about belief, what are we talking about? What makes belief? I think that our kind of baseline assumption is that belief is when I present you with a series of creedal statements and you say "Yes, I agree!"

but I wonder: is belief something that lives in your mind, like in your brain or in your thinking, or

is belief something that you hold in your heart, something emotional or intuitive, something that feels right or at least feels like it is worth pursuing or

does belief live in your gut, like an instinct,

or does it live in your arms and legs, embodied in the way that you live and move in the world, as if there is an ethic or a set of values that matter enough to you that they have shaped your life?

I wonder, if someone says they believe in all this stuff, and then lives their life in a way that contradicts the teachings of the gospel, what does their belief count for?

I wonder, if someone says that they struggle to believe this stuff, but they show up and say the words and ask questions and live their lives in a way that honors the spirit of what we think God asks of us, and still they have unanswered questions-- I wonder what that desire to believe is worth? A lot, I think.

I say all this to say that it can feel really easy to treat doubt and belief both as problems to be solved, questions to be answered, tensions in need of resolution, or that one has to triumph over the other, and I'm just not sure that that is what it has to be like.

The story of Doubting Thomas is what we get every year on the second Sunday of Easter and it can be so tempting to moralize Thomas one way or the other, either that his doubt was bad and a sign of weak faith, or that his doubt was healthy and an appropriate response to the circumstances, and I've been playing lately with the idea I guess that doubt isn't something you can moralize, doubt isn't good or bad, doubt just is. Valid or invalid isn't something that doubt can be. Doubt isn't an enemy or a friend, doubt is just a neighbor, and you can't really pick your neighbors, you can't decide when they use the leafblower or when they show up on your doorstep with a banana bread, you can't decide when they move in or when they move out or when they go on vacation or when they take up smoking on the front porch just upwind from you. Doubt is just... there.

I mean all this to say that if you have doubts, that's real. If you feel certain. That's real. If you doubt now in a way you used to not, or if you feel settled in your beliefs in a way that you never thought possible, those are both real. And if some form of doubt has been your neighbor for a long while or just a little while, I imagine you are not alone in that. Aaaaand, I wonder what it would feel like to absolve yourself of the responsibility to resolve your doubts. Remember, that the apostles weren't the paragons of certainty themselves: Peter sank into the water after Jesus told him to walk towards him. Thomas couldn't believe that Jesus came back from the dead. The apostles did nottt think that Jesus could feed 5000 people with 5 loaves and two fish. His followers famously misunderstood his parables and misunderstood all the things he foretold. Doubt and uncertainty was with them for basically the whole gospel, and the way they pushed the plot forward was not that they cured their doubt but simply that they kept showing up, they kept following, and wondered what they would find if they kept going.

Jesus says, of Thomas, blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe. All told, the women at the tomb saw, and believed. The apostles in the upper room saw, and believed. Thomas saw, and believed. Weee are the ones who haven't quite seen in the same way. Do you think that: "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe" might just be about us? Amen.

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Did God really make the world in seven days?

If Adam and Eve were the first humans, where did Cain and Abel find their wives?

Why didn't the animals on the ark eat each other?

Why did God keep hardening Pharoah's heart in Exodus?

How come there was soo much food left over after the feeding of the 5000?

Why do bad things happen to good people?

How did Jesus rise from the dead?