April 27, 2025 · Joe Jencks · Psalm 150; John 20:19-31
Singer-songwriter Joe Jencks, a guest that morning with Deidre McCalla, reads Thomas not as a man of weak faith but of a broken heart, afraid to hope after Jesus's execution, and follows the tradition that carried Thomas to India. With words from Madeleine Albright and Rabindranath Tagore, the sermon invites the congregation into a journey of doubt, faith, hope and community, and teaches a Jencks song, “Come With Me.”
Transcript
I am ever mindful, as a guest in the pulpit, that it is an extraordinary privilege to be able to share thoughts and ideas with you and to be given the gift of this time together.
I should begin by saying that even though I attended seminary, I was kicked out of seminary. In full disclosure. That's maybe more dramatic than what really happened. But at the end of at the end of a term, one of my professors came up to me and he said, I don't think you need to be here. I said, what do you mean? He said, I think you need in your heart, you think that you need the approval of an institution to do the work of ministry. But I see you doing that through your music. And furthermore, you have a kind of neutrality as an artist, where you can sneak in somewhat stealthily and provide ministry in unexpected places. But as soon as you are a standard bearer for the denomination, you lose that neutrality. He said, I don't I don't think you need to be here. I think you are already doing what you were supposed to do. I think you're just afraid of it. And he asked me to come into his office, and he told me to take a knee, and I did, obediently. And he grabbed a ruler off his desk, and he tapped both of my shoulders and then commanded me to rise. And that was my dismissal from seminary. I say that just to say that I carry no ecclesiastical authority of any kind. I'm just a fella with a guitar and some opinions.
Thomas was afraid to believe. He was afraid to believe that Jesus was alive. He was not afraid to believe because he doubted the possibility. He was afraid to believe because his heart was broken. The person that he loved more than any. The person who had taught him the most about how he wanted to be in the world, had been killed, had been dubbed a radical and a dissenter, and had been executed. This broke Thomas's heart. He needed evidence, not because his faith was weak, but because his heart was so guarded in that place of grief. He could not allow himself the hopefulness of the possibility that Jesus was still present with them in some way. His form of faith is misunderstood, I think, as a cautionary tale. But it is very much the story of a person who was grieving, but the same invitation to reach beyond doubt and fear and into faith and hope and community exists for us today.
Thomas found a pathway in spite of his skepticism. He found a faith. Excuse me. He found a pathway, not in spite of his skepticism, but because of it. He was a man of critical thinking. But when it came time to obey the invitation that Jesus had given them, go forth and do likewise. He did.
Peter ran from the calling. He too was terrified. On the night that Jesus was arrested, Peter denied his association. Judas did not understand the spiritual revolution that Jesus was talking about and was all about the political revolution. And as we see Judas portrayed as the betrayer of the faith, I think Judas was also a man with a broken heart and out of a place of grief for watching an oppressed and occupied people continue to be oppressed out of a sadness that the kind of liberation that he was yearning for was not the kind of liberation that Jesus was talking about. Judas made his own choices, but I think he too, is misunderstood in the modern context.
I think all of these people were as nuanced and complex as anyone who lives today, and I think it's important to hold in our heart the possibility that each one of us has the capacity to be misguided regarding what the most salient conversation is in the moment. Judas was misguided about the direction of the spiritual revolution that Jesus was talking about. Thomas was afraid to believe, not because his faith was weak, but because his heart was broken. Peter was afraid to be associated with Jesus for fear that he too would be executed.
All of us carry ideas in our head our ethics, our morals, our conscience. A vision of the world as we imagine it can be. And there is a tacit invitation to pick up the torch, as Thomas did, as the apostles did, and carry our faith forward. Not to proselytize to the world or preach to the world, or be religious colonialists who try and convert people to our way of thinking or our faith. But to bear witness in the world by our actions, by who we are, by how we are in the world.
My favourite pub in Ireland has a hand calligraphy sign on the wall. When you go into the main room and it says all who enter this establishment bring us joy, some by staying and some by leaving. And I think there's a tacit invitation in this story about Thomas and his doubt and his fear to ask ourselves, when we enter a situation, are we making other people feel more welcome? Are we teaching people more about how they want to be in the world, or are we teaching them more about how they don't want to be in the world? There's an invitation in Thomas's experience.
Madeleine Albright was secretary of state during the first Obama administration, said, I have spent a lifetime looking for remedies to all manner of life's problems personal, social, political, global. I am deeply suspicious of those who offer simple solutions and statements of absolute certainty, or who claim full possession of the truth a little bit like Thomas. Yet I have grown equally skeptical of those who suggest that all is too nuanced and complex for us to learn any lessons, that there are so many sides to every thing that we can pursue knowledge every day of our lives and still know nothing for certain. I believe we can recognize truth when we see it, just not at first, and not without ever relenting in our efforts to learn more. This is because the goal we seek, the good we hope for, comes not as some final reward, but as the hidden companion to our quest. It is not what we find, but the reason we cannot stop looking. That tells us why we are here.
Thomas picked up the invitation. It is reported in many writings Noncanonical Christian writings, including the Gospel of Thomas, the stories of his entry into what we would now think of as India and the founding of Christian communities in India is well documented from many different sources. There is a tomb in India that is believed to be the final resting place of the Apostle Thomas, and there is a flame there that they say has been burning for nearly nineteen hundred years in his honor, that he brought the light of the spiritual revolution that Jesus was teaching to India. I don't know what the impact of that was over the course of the better part of two thousand years.
But it strikes me that when the three wise men, as they are referred to in Scripture, came to visit Jesus as a child, that they would have brought ideas from the Far East, they would have brought ideas that related to Hinduism that came out of Buddhism, teachings of Taoism. They brought the wisdom of their people, and they were following a prophecy to meet the one who would lead this new spiritual revolution. Much in the way that Buddhists in Tibet go on search for the next incarnation of the Dalai Lama, these wise men that showed up bringing gifts to Jesus were seeking someone that they knew would be wise. And so it stands to follow that Thomas would have headed to India, would have gone to a place where. Teachings that Jesus was building on as a radical rabbi, the writings of Hillel, the writings of other people. Jesus took those ideas because they were the ideas that were familiar to us as human beings and familiar in our cultural narratives. And he built on those. And it stands to follow that he would follow that path backwards into the regions where these wise teachings had come from, and share with them the new spiritual revolution.
He paid an extraordinary price. He eventually was a martyr of the faith, but his teachings survived and grew and evolved in India. His writings are revered in the Coptic Christian communities and in many Christian communities in India. We don't know the exact impact that these ideas and teachings had, but a message of radical love, a message of radical hospitality, a message of extraordinary acceptance and forgiveness would have been received deeply by those people in that time. Did it impact the life of Gandhi or many of the other Indian mystics? It stands to reason that it would have. It would have dovetailed with many of their belief systems and ideas that came out of the Bhagavad Gita and out of the Upanishads.
But I think it most finds growth in a modern context in the writings of Rabindranath Tagore, Rabindranath Tagore, the poet of Bengal, the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for literature in nineteen thirteen. Also the first person to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature as a lyricist, as a poet, rather than a writer of prose. He gives us these words that say, I think more than I ever could about the possible impact of this radical spiritual revolution that Jesus invites all of us into, and the potential implications for the present moment. Mind you, this was written in the very first part of the twentieth century, where the mind is without fear and the head held high, where knowledge is free, where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls, where the words come out from the depth of truth, where tireless striving stretches its arms toward perfection, where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way. Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit. Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action into that heaven of freedom. My father let my country awake.
I invite you to sing a song with me that you don't know yet, but you will very soon. It's called Come With Me. And I sing this song today as a reminder to myself and to all of us that we are on a journey together. We are on a journey that we choose to be on as members of intentional community, and as those who study the teachings and wish to live those teachings. Wish to walk in the footsteps of the fishermen. MM. Every time I feel the spirit moving in my heart, I will pray. Maybe the spirit shows up as static, I don't know, but there it is. The song. Come With Me. The lyrics to the chorus. [sings the chorus of his song “Come With Me”]
I think in the wake of Easter, as we prepare moving forward for Pentecost, as we think about our own role in the story that continues to unfold in the living traditions of the teachings of Jesus, it is most important to remember that we are in community, and as we strive to live those teachings in community, to stand up for those who need our assistance, to be present with those who are in need to be forgiving of each other in our imperfections. It is important to remember that we are on this journey together.