Open Writing

Thomas was the disciple who refused to believe that Jesus had risen until he touched him with his own hands.

We can't blame Thomas for not believing the other disciples when they said that Jesus was back from the dead. Jesus's followers had been on an emotional rollercoaster. First they went through the panic of the arrest, then the desperation of seeing the crowd turn against Jesus, the despair of the crucifixion and then the beginning of what they thought would be months of grieving.

If you'd been through all that emotion and then heard your friends say that Jesus was back from the dead would you have believed them straight away?

Jesus's return to life was a difficult thing for Thomas to believe, and it's still a difficult thing for people today.

We all have friends who say things like: "How can you go to church? How can you believe that a man was born of a virgin and rose from the dead?"

Christianity is full of beliefs that seem to go against science, so lots of people can't believe what we believe. What they don't understand is that if you believe in God, you also believe that He can bend the laws of nature when He wants to.

If someone is exploring Christianity and thinking about whether or not to believe, they should begin with God. For Christians belief in the resurrection follows naturally from belief in the living God who comes to us when we are at prayer. It is not belief in the resurrection that leads to faith in God.

For cradle Christians it can be hard to understand why some people are so determined to avoid Christianity at all costs. They even seem actively prejudiced against Christianity.

The fact is that there is no such thing as a non-believer. We all believe in something. Every age has a dominant belief system. We just don't see that belief system when we are within it because we think it is normality, we think it is how the world has always been.

In our own time in Britain the dominant belief system is what can be described as scientific materialism. There is a strong belief that the physical world is all that there is.

It can be very very traumatic for people who follow this belief when they open themselves to God. For these people, becoming a Christian demands that they completely change their thoughts about how the world works. That can be devastatingly difficult for some people. I know because I was one of them.

I should make it clear now that Christianity is not anti-science. If you believe that stories such as Adam and Eve, the Creation and Jonah and the Whale are written as theology rather than history (history writing did not exist in those days), it is perfectly possible to believe in Darwin and believe in Christ.

There are also Doubting Thomases inside the church. Many Christians are called to work with people who behave in terrible ways. They steal, they lie, they cause physical harm to others, and generally seem to be scumbags.

So when Christians work with them, believing sincerely that God can change even the foulest murderer, others Christians look on and say: "What are you doing? How can you believe that there's any good in a person like that? How can you believe that this terrible murderer can change?"

There are even Christians who don't want "bad" people to come near the church because the church is holy, and they imagine that "bad" people might make it dirty.

Funnily enough, you probably can't answer these Doubting Thomases unless you've been a scumbag yourself.

Take me for example. I didn't steal or lie or murder anybody, don't worry about that. But I wasn't communicating properly with my friends. I wasn't telling them what I thought and what I felt. So during a particularly stressful situation a lot of negative feelings built up inside me and I developed the nasty habit of slagging people off behind their backs. I was like a kettle with a build up of steam. I had to let the steam out somehow.

I didn't like what I was doing, particularly as I know that Jesus tells us to be direct with people. So one day I told God that I wasn't happy, that I didn't really understand what was going on with me, and that I wanted to change. God helped me to see that if I communicated properly with people, I wouldn't be hoarding up negative feelings and so I wouldn't say nasty things.

From that day on I resolved to change. I think I felt a little of what a murderer must feel when he finds God in prison. I suppose you might say that I felt a little bit of God's grace. When we recognise that we have done wrong, and we tell God that we want to change, He sends us a helping hand.

It's like a hand pulling you up when you've got yourself wedged in the sofa. You might not know it's there at the time, but it is.

I had a sense that I had been been cleansed. On occasions like that, while you should feel very sorry for what you did in the past and fix it if possible, the day that you are genuinely sorry is a new start and the new start is what matters. The sin is the crucifixion and the new start is the resurrection.

God's forgiveness doesn't mean that the sin doesn't matter. Christianity isn't a get out of jail free card. It's not about saying that you can repeatedly do bad things, be forgiven and then go off and do bad things again. It's not that at all.

Our sins will hang around our necks forever, as heavy as millstones. The sins we commit on life's journey are part of what makes us who we are. But God's grace, God's love and God's forgiveness will enable us to walk with those sins around our necks as if we were dancing on air, as if our bodies were lighter than air.

Jesus's return to life after the crucifixion was a signal of all that. It was life coming out of death in the same way that God's grace pulls us out of sin.

So back to Doubting Thomas. What are we to do with the Doubting Thomases of this world who refuse to believe that there is a God, that he loves them and that he can help them to make their lives better?

We have to do something because in God we have found something good, and as Christians we are called by God to help other people to live happy and healthy lives. We have to share God because He is good, it's a logical progression.

I think the first thing we can do to share God is to show some flexibility in our beliefs. Due to the dominance of fundamentalist writing on the Internet, Christianity has gained a reputation in Britain as being a very rigid faith that is completely intolerant of other religions.

You might think that being tolerant towards other religions makes you into a doubting Thomas.

I'm not saying that all religions have the same level of truth in them. I'm not saying that atheism (which is a religion, if it wasn't a religion atheists wouldn't need to give themselves a label) is the same as believing in God. I'm not saying that truth is relative. i.e. What's true for me isn't true for you.

What I'm saying is that, I believe, as Christians we can say: "I believe what the Bible says about Jesus, but I also believe that God is far bigger and greater than my understanding, so he may work outside Christianity. God is love and love is everywhere."

I think it's important to have this kind of attitude, because the other option, saying -- "we Christians are right and every other faith was created by Satan" is what makes people doubt us.

Christianity is the religion of love, and saying that God has destined half the world's population to burn in hell is not loving. It does not communicate to anyone that God is pure love. It makes Him sound rather petty.

Would God really say to his children "believe in Jesus or I'm just not that interested in you?" If He did say that, then He's not the loving God that Jesus tells us about.

Lots of people won't convert to Christianity, won't come anywhere near the church, because they think that being a Christian involves saying that anyone who is not a Christian is bad. They see that certainty of belief as being too rigid and too inflexible.

If you show your friends that Christians are tolerant towards others, they might be so surprised that they open their minds to investigating the faith.

Avoiding that rigid, fixed certainty that God has confined Himself to the Bible and is to be found nowhere else does not make you into a Doubting Thomas. It makes you someone who accepts the infinite, awesome, magnificent, incomprehensible nature of God.

Let me explain what I mean.

We Christians believe that God is the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. But he is also ONE.

You can never chop the ONE God into three parts. But, those three names, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, reflect the different ways in which we encounter Him.

The Son is Jesus, who we encounter through the Bible. He is the light that we Christians must follow. He is God's instruction to the world. The living Word.

The Holy Spirit is the action of God in our lives.

And the Father, I think, is the God that all believers encounter, whatever their religion. He is infinite, eternal and so mighty that it hurts the brain trying to think about him.

I think, when people have a sense that there is something behind physical reality, something peaceful, loving, calm, infinite and immeasurably deep, like an abyss that you could just fall into and never stop falling into, perhaps even something that is terrifying in its magnificence, that is God the Father. I personally believe that He is what a lot of other religions are responding to.

He is real, and He is there to respond to whether you believe in Jesus or not.

I've heard some people who follow religions where there is no God say that this deep abyss is universe energy, and that it is very peculiar of Christians to call it God and give it a personality. Without Jesus and the prophets it is very hard to see the personality in God because He is beyond comprehension. So I can see why people would describe God as universe energy.

So, back to Doubting Thomas. What else can you do to help the Doubting Thomases in your life discover the wonderful changes that God can bring to our lives as his children?

The answer is delightfully simple. It is Jesus's New Commandment, the one he gave at the Last Supper. Jesus said, love one another as I have loved you, and by this they will know that you are my disciples.

By reflecting Jesus's teachings in your life, you will change people's hearts and open their minds to Jesus. The church has no need of fancy PR. The church has no need for clever advertising campaigns. The church has no need to come up with ever more inventive ways of making itself relevant to contemporary culture.

All the church needs is people who live the Gospel in their every day lives. That is the only advert that Christianity needs. When people live the Gospel, with all the truth and humility that the Way brings, it is so magnetically attractive that other people want to find out more about them.

But you will have to be patient, as I have discovered after watching Christians work with troubled people. Some people are so damaged that it takes them a long long time to recognise Jesus. But how long it takes them to recognise Jesus isn't something that you have any control over, all you can do is plant the evidence of Jesus in their lives. You just have to keep trying whether or not they recognise Jesus. That's all you can do. Maybe the people you are working with will recognise Jesus next week, maybe in 80 years time. All you can do is give them the memory that Jesus was there for them.

And we're not talking about sharing God's love because we want everyone to agree with us. We're not talking about saving people from Hell. We're not talking about hassling anybody. People must have freedom to choose their own religion. We evangelise because God is good and we want to share that with others.

We began this sermon with Doubting Thomas. He is a good person to remember as we go about our lives as Christians because he reminds us that things are not always as they seem.

Doubt is not a bad thing. Thomas was obviously a sceptical chap who had learnt not to take what people said at face value. In the Bible he gets told off for his lack of faith. But in other areas, back in the rough and tough world of Palestine 2,000 years ago, perhaps his need for hard evidence was a good thing.

If we are to be Christians, living in community with one another, we always, always, always, have to keep in mind that things are not always what we think they are. It's healthy to doubt our own ideas about the world. Doubt encourages communication and understanding.

We see the world through a filter, like a coloured filter on a camera lens. That coloured filter is our experience, and that coloured filter can lead us to close our hearts to other people. For example, a woman who has always been abused by men, might become someone who closes her heart against all men. The abusive experience is the coloured filter on her camera lens. It teaches her to avoid abusive men, and so it should, we should all avoid people who abuse us, BUT it goes too far and causes her to close her heart to men she doesn't even know.

God calls us to open our hearts to everybody. So no matter how much this woman believes that she should avoid all men, it would be better for her if she doubted herself a little.

When you argue with your friends you should imagine a little St Thomas sitting on one shoulder saying "Are you sure? Are you really really sure?" and a little Jesus on the other saying "Talk to your friend."

So there you go, believe that God loves us all, but never be afraid to doubt.