Rev. Cn. Richard Hogue
May the words of my lips and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight, my Lord, my rock and my redeemer. Amen. Please be seated.
All right. So, I want to check something before I get going. How many people here at least sympathize with Thomas in our gospel this morning? All right. Let’s take it a step further. How many people if you were in the story would be Thomas? Yeah, I thought as much.
Doubt is a powerful thing, but I don’t think it’s the opposite of faith. In fact, I encourage doubt because I think doubt and faith are kind of like a yin and a yang. You can’t grow your faith without wrestling with doubt. So, doubt always gives faith the opportunity to be renewed, to grow, to find new things. I would definitely be Thomas on that morning.
You’ve just a week ago seen one of your dear friends and your leader gruesomely executed in front of God and everybody in the city of Jerusalem. And now here you are in a room full of people saying, “He’s back. He’s back.” And I would definitely be the guy asking myself “how I am not participating in the mass hallucination that is clearly going on here?.”
So, I want to frame Thomas through my own journey of faith and doubt as it relates to the resurrection in many of you have heard this before but just to refresh and for anybody who might be new I grew up in a kind of twofold space in life. I went to the Episcopal church every Sunday with mom and dad and then I went to a small, very conservative, biblically fundamentalist Christian private school the rest of the week. The Episcopal Church tends to hold things lightly and gently. The other tradition, you can imagine, not so much.
So, growing up, it wasn’t really a question of faith versus doubt. It was simply something I accepted. I accepted that the resurrection was real. I accepted what was going on in those spaces and lived into it. But as I got into my teenage years, especially closer to high school and especially through college, the other main theological influence besides the Episcopal church and the school I went to was punk rock. I was a huge fan of the Sex Pistol. Still am. Bet you didn’t have that on your bingo card, by the way, for today. Um, The Misfits, Green Day, Bad Religion. I loved all, I still love many of those bands. So, you can imagine the dynamic between those three different pieces. Holding things gently, being extremely absurdly certain, and then complete questioning of tradition and institutions and that sort of thing.
I was still faithful to the Episcopal Church throughout my college years as well, but I became more and more and more skeptical as time went on. And then I moved to South Africa after graduating from college. And I moved to Mthatha, which is a small town on the Eastern Cape of South Africa. And I worked as an Episcopal missionary, not Bible thumping, but walking alongside people, trying to help heal folks, essentially as an orderly in a small medical clinic in a garbage dump slum of about 5,000 or so people. It taught me what suffering really is. It taught me what real life can look like outside of my first world and very white dominated spaces.
And I essentially abandoned the resurrection because the suffering I saw on a day-to-day basis was so immense. And I really started to get into Buddhism just because it promised an escape from suffering. The sayings of the Buddha helped me a lot in that time period. And I drifted further, except for one thing…
A patient who I will never forget. Her name was Zandile Xuza. And Zandile was one of those folks who always had a smile on. At the clinic, we had the only source of fresh water for that entire garbage dump community. And so we saw everybody come through every single day who wanted fresh water. And Zandile was one of those who always showed up on time for her anti-retrovirals. She was a I forget what stage of of HIV AIDS, but a latter stage. She was one of our best patients, she always smiled and greeted everybody when she came to the well. And one day as I was leading a group of volunteers around to show the space, show them our kindergarten room, our preschool room, our community garden, our music room, and then our little clinic where we took care of so many people.
I asked the folks who were in the clinic just to say hello. Molo in isiXhosa. And so everybody stood up and said hello with smiles. But not Zandile. She, with a very serious face on, stood up in front of this group of people from the United States and Canada and she said, “My name is Zandile Xuza and I have AIDS.”
A black woman living in the garbage dump with that disease and all the things against her. To be able to stand up in front of people who represent what we call some of the most advanced and powerful societies in the world was awe inducing. For her to claim the wounds, for her to name what ailed her and still be the most powerful person, one of the most powerful people I’ve ever seen in my entire life changed me. And it wasn’t until after she died that I realized I had seen it. I had seen the risen Lord. I had already put my hands in the wounds. I had already known the ailments.
Folks, I don’t need to ask myself if I believe in the resurrection. I don’t need to believe it. I have seen it. I’ve seen it with these two eyes. And there’s no need for me to wrestle with that question anymore. No. Instead, what I find to be the far more faithful question at this stage in my journey is, how serious do I take it? Am I being serious with the reality of the resurrection? Because it changes how I resist evil in our time. It changes how I repent of my own wrongdoings. It changes how I seek to serve Christ in every person. And it especially changes how I view the dignity and respect for every human being.
So I invite you wherever you are on your journey, whatever faith and doubt wrestling match is going on for you right now, which I encourage, but I ask you to stop torturing yourself with the question of “what do I believe?” and ask, “do I take it seriously?” Because when you come to the altar with that question, when you go back out into the world with that question, when you are faithful in that question, you are walking with Thomas and all the other disciples this Easter season. And you’re already here. You’re already in the room. Continue to ask. Continue to question. Continue to walk faithfully with us and I promise you, you will see the resurrection and it will give you immense joy.
I pray this with you. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
