First Unitarian Church, Portland, Oregon

March 28, 1999

Opening words from William Stafford

Everyone first hears the news as a child,

surrounded by money-changers and pharisees;

then later, from gray trees on a winter day,

amid all the twittering, one flash of sound

escapes along a creek—some fanatic among

the warblers broken loose like a missionary

sent out to the hinterland, and though the doors

that open along the creek stay closed for the cold,

and the gray people in their habitats don’t look out,

you a homeless walker stabbed by that bird cry

stop mid-stride because out of a thicket

that little tongue turns history loose again, and holy

days asleep in the calendar wake up and chime.

I’m not sure exactly how old I was, probably 11 or 12. I was sitting at a table at church with my minister and several others my age. We were talking about the importance of believing in Jesus if we were to be saved.

Now this seemed like something I could go with. Everyone around me seemed to be doing it. Being saved seemed like an important thing. I didn’t want to go to hell.

But, of course, questions were coming up. It all seemed to easy. After all, I asked, what about all those people in China who have never heard of Jesus. Will they not be saved?

I don’t exactly remember what the response was from my minister. But one memory of the conversation is very clear to me. It was not OK to have asked the question.

It was an early lesson in where doubt would get me.

I eventually left the church of my childhood. There were many reasons for this. It was some years after this conversation, but I think that may have planted a seed that would later grow.

To be human is to doubt and question things.

Early in our lives, we believe most anything that our parents tell us. And for a time, that makes for a safe and secure world. But we soon come to realize that life is not as simple as that. There are lots of questions and the answers may or may not be easy to find.

We wrestle with our beliefs. We look at the world around us, and we try to figure to all out.

We try to figure out why things are the way they are. We struggle with other people, with institutions, with ourselves.

There are things we want to believe in, but we have a lot of questions, and we have a lot of doubts about how it is all going to work out.

And in this, we are not alone.

The patron saint of doubters, of course, in Thomas.

The story is told in the Gospel of John goes like this: It is the evening of the day when Jesus rose from the dead. The Apostles assembled in a room and barred the doors, afraid they would be persecuted. Yet Jesus came and stood among them and he showed them his wounds.

Thomas was absent from the group that night. In the days afterward, the disciples told Thomas they'd seen Jesus. But Thomas had his doubts. "Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side," he told them, "I will not believe."

A week later, the disciples were again together and this time Thomas was with them." Again the doors were shut, and again Jesus came and stood among them and offered them peace. Now, Jesus' arrival alone might be a sign that he really had risen from the dead. Remember, there were bars on the doors. But Thomas still had his doubts, and rightly so, because if what he doubted was that the Jesus the others had seen was flesh and blood, a man walking and talking, he would hardly be persuaded by a figure who was able to pass through locked doors.

Thomas wanted proof.

Jesus turned to him and said, "Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side; do not be faithless, but believing."

We don't know whether Thomas reached out then, whether he pressed his finger in the wounded hands and felt the gash over his ribs.

All he said was "My Lord and my God." He believed.

Thomas, because of this, will always be the doubter. But as he asked, he saw, he believed and in doing deepened his faith. But he came to this belief because of his doubt. Even if the other disciples also questioned, it was Thomas who pushed it.

It seems that someone had to do that.

Thomas, in Greek, means twin. It has been said that he is the twin of all of us, because, we, too, want to know more. It is natural to ask questions and to doubt. Because of this, all of us are twins of Thomas.

This is one story from the bible that is easy to relate to. I don’t know what I would have done in the situation, but I can expect I would have wanted some proof. We need to see the world through our own eyes—not just by what we are told, but what our experiences tell us.

Of course we can’t always do that—we have to figure it all out. And our perspectives on all this can vary a lot.

The story of Thomas can either be a celebrated story or one that holds up one of little faith. Throughout time, there have been many perspectives on this one.

Throughout most of history human beings have lived in situations in which

there was general consensus on the nature of reality and on the norms by which one should lead one's life. This consensus was almost everywhere grounded in religion and it was taken for granted.

Today the situation is more pluralistic. Different people see things in different ways, and not everyone is the same. It raises a lot more doubt about what we can count on. Because we can’t take a lot of things for granted, there’s more for us to figure out.

It seems a little paradoxical given that we live in a time when we have so much information, and therefore it would seem, proof to look at.

Now, by studying our DNA, all kinds of things are known. We can even guess what we are likely to die of. And we know that if our DNA is left somewhere, we may be in trouble like we haven’t been before.

We know how things work together, and we can go farther and at a fast pace than people have ever gone before.

And yet all this knowledge can remind us of all the things we don’t know.

What really makes the brain function?

What is it that gives us the feelings and the emotions we experience?

What is it that might solve a situation like we experience in the former Yugoslavia? Can’t all of our knowledge do something about that?

And in the end, we also come to know all that we don’t know.

And it is from that place that our searching begins.

We look for answers and we look for meaning.

We rely on what we see and hear, on what others tell us, what we know from our own experience.

And in the end we may find that there may not be one right answer. The truth may be out there, it just isn’t always clear.

A group of rabbis were arguing over the right interpretation of a biblical text. Rabbi Eleazar, who had interpreted the text one way, was one of the authorities cited, as was Rabbi Yochanan, who had interpreted it differently. The rabbis could not agree. In the group there was also a mystic, Rabbi Amaitai. He said that it was possible for him to enter into an ecstasy that would take him directly before the throne of the Almighty; he offered to do so and to ask God himself to give the correct interpretation. The group agreed, whereupon the mystic took off in his ecstasy, stood before the throne and addressed God: "King of the Universe, we cannot agree on this text. Can you give us the correct interpretation?"

God, who of course was himself occupied in the study of Torah, shuffled his papers, shook his head, and finally replied: "Well, Rabbi Eleazar says so-and-so, but Rabbi Yochanan says so-and-so, and then there is Rabbi Amitai

who says so-and-so..."

It’s not easy getting a straight answer.

As Unitarian Universalists, we have historically honored and cherished such ambiguity. We cherish the search and honor wrestling with the doubt. We put our faith to questioning and rely on the reason and intuition of the individual to discern what it is we each believe.

We are open to revelation as we experience it. This leaves us open to discover. If fact, we are charged to lead this search.

But this is also a place where we get stuck. We see things in a certain way and we may not want to open ourselves up. We doubt, but maybe that is all we do. We come to see the limits of our reasoning, and we don’t always know what to do with that.

If we are constantly open to revelation, we are open to what the world might teach us. But with this we must bring a degree of humility to accept those things we can’t know, and have faith in the journey.

It is here we must be open to where the search may lead us. And follow that path.

It is important to know what it is we believe, and also to be open to new beliefs. What I believe today may not be what I believe tomorrow or ten years from now. Our lives and our beliefs are changing, evolving things.

The skeptical Lutheran boy is still a part of me, and always will be. But over time I’ve also tried to focus on what it is I believe and to hold that in balance with my doubts. I’ve also come to realize that there is a lot I have to believe in. The people in this congregation teach me that everyday.

My doubts ask me to look deeper and discern what is most important in my life, and always to walk with my eyes wide open.

That, of course, is the challenge.

A story from the Hindu tradition:

"God has many names," a guru told his disciple, "and one of these is Rama. If you see God in everything, then you will be safe whereever you go." So the disciple traveled, and everywhere he went he recited "Ram, Ram," to keep himself safe.

One day he came to a village that was being terrorized by a mad elephant who would rampage through the streets regularly. When the villagers warned to disciple that the elephant had been heard nearby, the disciple was not concerned. "My guru told me only to recognize God in everything and I will be safe," he answered. But the villagers persisted, insisting that it was very dangerous to go out when the elephant was around.

"This elephant is God, and I am God, so why should I be afraid?" thought the disciple, and he went right out into the street. The elephant, seeing a man in the middle of the street, charged right at him. "Watch out!" cried the villagers. And even as the disciple thought "I am God and you are God," the mad elephant picked him up and dashed him to the side of the road, nearly killing the poor man.

After a long convalescence the disciple returned to his guru to tell the story and complain. "You told me to see Rama in everything and I would be safe, and now look at me."

"Oh, my disciple," replied the guru, "you were right to see God in yourself and in the elephant." "But why did you fail to recognize God warning you in the voice of the villagers?"

Living with our eyes and our hearts open, is one of the great challenges. Sometimes we may see a lot more than we really want to see, but that his how we grow and learn.

Thomas Merton, the Christian contempletive, said "What matters is being spontaneously open to the reality of God."

Do you ever wonder why you come to church? Why you don’t stay at home and read the Sunday paper, or watch "This week with Sam and Cokie"?

I think about that on Sundays when I look out at your faces.

I know we come for many reasons, perhaps as many reasons as there are people here.

I think, however, that we don’t so much come to church because of what we know, but because of what we don’t know.

In this coming, we reach out to others to learn, to grow, to find a place to wrestle with our doubts.

We come to be in community, to know that others are with us on the journey.

We come to open ourselves to a mystery.

We come to live with the paradoxes in our lives.

We live in what writer Kathleen Norris calls sacred ambiguity. We don’t have the answers, but we trust we will find them as we need to. We trust others will be there for us and that the answers, in time, will come, and that we will have faith to accept those things we can’t know.

Norris says doubt is merely a sign that faith is ready to grow, it is like a seed waiting to sprout.

She describes faith as a relationship that never has all the answers, but that you trust in the fact that they will come. When you enter it, you don’t know exactly how it will all work out, but you come, willing to stay with it and to be open to where it may lead. In the process, you do lots of questioning, but you agree to walk on a path together.

It may not be terribly logical, but we instinctively know it is where we need to be.

And it may be that when we don’t know where to go, and are feeling the least certain, that an opening comes.

A church in Chicago faced a crisis. Their pastor had left, attendance was way down and their community outreach program was threatened with closure. They didn’t know what to do. The leadership suggested an all-night vigil of prayer.

Several people raised questions. Was it safe, given our inner-city neighborhood? Should they hire guards or escorts for the parking lot? What if no one showed up? These things were considered, but the night of prayer was scheduled.

It was the poorest members of the congregation, a group of senior citizens from a housing project, were the ones who came through the most enthusiastically. A younger, richer member wondered how many of their prayers had gone unanswered over the years—they lived in the projects, after all, amid crime, poverty, and suffering—yet they showed a great trust in the power of prayer. When asked if they wanted to stay an hour or two, they said, "Oh, we'll stay all night."

One woman in her nineties, who walks with a cane and can barely see, explained why she wanted to spend the night sitting on the hard pews of a church in an unsafe neighborhood. "You see, there are lots of things we can't do in this church. We ain't so educated, and we ain't got as much energy as some of you younger folks. But we can pray. We got time, and we got faith. Some of us don't sleep much anyway. We can pray all night if we have to."

And so they did. And in their praying, they taught a group of yuppies in a downtown church learned anew a lesson of faith from the Gospels: Faith appears where least expected and falters where it should be thriving."

I’m called away from sermon writing to visit a congregant who has just gone into the hospital with complications from surgery. Doctors are working to figure out what is wrong. He had surgery a couple days ago and he isn’t progressing the way he should be. He and his wife are scared.

As I come into the room and see tubes coming out of his body. Monitors all around him are quietly beeping as the hospital staff go about their business.

His partner says she feels like there is not a lot she can do here. She is feeling fearful and discouraged.

We stand there together. I tell her that being there just like she is doing is very important.

Her husband nods in approval. They stay there, though it, together.

We will never have all the answers, but we need to keep showing up. Our doubts will always be there, we just need to walk with them and be open to what they have to teach us.

In closing, words of the Persian mystic, Rumi:

Keep walking, though there’s no place to get to.

Don’t try to see through the distances. That’s not for human beings.

Move within, but don’t move the way fear makes you move.

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened.

Don’t open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

May this be our prayer. Amen.

Let us pray: God of life, in this time of Passover and Easter, be with us in our belief and in our unbelief. Help us to live life deliberately, faithfully, always open to where your spirit might open us to understanding. May we build a community of faith that calls us forth to service. In that service, may we grow in love. In doing this may we find that peace that passes understanding. Amen.

Benediction: Keep walking, cherish your doubts, and celebrate all that is possible. Go in love. Go in peace. Amen.

Copyright 1999 by Rev. Thomas Disrud. All rights reserved.