Do you have a nickname?  I have had a couple, in high school my friends all called me “Will” which is short of course for Wilson.  The other one that people still call me is “The Man” as in “Stan the Man.”  If I ever get a true sports car, I am going to have a custom licence plate that says “The Man” on it.  Dianna says people will probably think that I am a drug dealer!  But nicknames are usually endearing or perhaps funny.  Names like “Rusty,” “Shorty (usually a tall person),” or “Slim” may be well-known, while there real names often are not.  I know Michael’s brothers in particular are known by their nicknames like “Shot,” “Skeeter,” and I can’t remember the rest.  I still think Michael has a secret one he won’t tell us!  Some southerners carry monikers like “Buster,” “Bubba,” “Butch,” or maybe “Sis,” although women don’t seem to have them as often.  Sports personality Michael Jordan was known as “Air Jordan,” or simply “Air.”  Charles Barkley was the “Round Mound of Rebound.”  And who could forget “Fats Domino” and “Minnesota Fats.”  I believe that all seven dwarfs must have had nicknames, surely their given names weren’t “Sleepy,” “Dopey,” “Grumpy,” and names like that.

            Some nicknames are not so flattering however.  History records examples such as “the Butcher,” Ivan “the terrible,” and Antiochus Epiphanes, “the Mad one.”  But how would you like to be stuck with a nickname that was based on one event in your life, and perhaps unjustly?  You can’t say the name of “Thomas” the apostle without saying “Doubting Thomas.”  Because of this passage, the man Thomas who  we really don’t know much about, forever lives with this moniker.  So what’s the story on Thomas?  He was not there for the earlier resurrection appearances, and he appeared skeptical of the reports from the  others.  In fact, unless he saw or touched the scars, he would not believe. He wanted proof.  He did doubt the others, not necessarily Jesus however. 

            Thomas was not a chicken, and was not singled out for a lame watered down faith, or even a lack of commitment. What we know for sure about him is found in only three passages in the gospel of John.   In John 11:16, it is Thomas who loyally if bluntly declares his willingness to follow Jesus back to Bethany and Lazarus’ tomb, even though Jesus was run out of town and nearly stoned there.  While the other disciples were cautious about this journey, Thomas said, “Let us go along, that we might die with him!”  For his steadfastness, he was rewarded by witnessing the stunning sight of Lazarus’ resurrection.  Thanks to Thomas’ persistent inquiry in John 14:5, Jesus was provoked into saying, “I am the way, the Truth and the Life.”  And the third and final passage of any substance about Thomas is this one.  Doubting Thomas, what a way to be remembered!

            And yet, if we are honest, we all are skeptics at times.  I am not alone in this.  There is a whole state of skeptics just to the north of us , Missouri, the “Show Me” state.  I often look at the website, Skepdic.Com or a site with a dictionary for the skeptic.  There is a club in Dallas, called the Bonehead Club.  To be a member and to have any chance to win “The Bonehead of the Year” award, you have to think and believe things like “we never really sent a man to the moon, it was all staged.”  You have to be an ill-informed skeptic.  But not all skeptics are ill-informed.  Go to Web Sites such as, “the Non-believers Page,” or Atheist for Jesus.com and you will find very skillfully trained philosophers who are very skeptical against all things religious.

            But to be honest, I have my doubts.  I doubt the efficacy of St. John’s Wort, or the effectiveness of Glucosomine/Chondrontin for arthritis.  I doubt in the latest miracle from Little Rock, Niagra.  I doubt that the Razorbacks will ever return to the final four again, and I doubt our legislature’s abilities to govern us well. I doubt the prediction that it will be a mild summer.  I have doubts about faith healers, televangelist, psychics, glossolalia, and the Shroud of Turin. 

            But I also have many doubts about my own faith.  I doubt all those views of God where he is created in the image of us instead of the other way around.  I doubt that God really told the children of Israel to kill all the women and children and animals of their enemies.  I have trouble with a vindictive God who torments his creation for not stroking his ego.  I have trouble with a God of no tolerance, and even more trouble with mean Christians.  I doubt God in answering my prayers at times, and I have a lot of questions to ask him someday.  I doubt that God is going to strike me down because of my questions– if so He would have a long time ago.  I doubt if God has a long white beard, and I doubt if he is either male or female.  To me, Faith is not certainty, faith is not seeing only, faith is not on our own terms, faith is not superstition or magic, faith is not works, faith is not a noun, and faith is not the opposite of doubt.  That’s right, faith is not the opposite of doubt!  They go hand-in-hand at times. 

            But then, what is faith?  It has to be more that sight, more than the physical evidence that Thomas demanded.  My mother relayed to me a joke that she heard in her church.  A science professor asked who in the class had ever seen God.  He then asked, who had ever touched God.  The class was silent on both questions, indicating that no one had touched or seen God.  He pronounced, Therefore, there is no God.  A student quickly jumped up and asked, Who had seen the professor’s brain, and who had touched it?  Therefore, he retorted, you have no brain!  Well, obviously the professor had a brain, albeit a misguided one, and there was evidence to that fact apart from sense experience.  So faith is then something more that seeing or sensing.  Faith is also something more than just knowing.  James tells us in his writings that the demons believe, but tremble!  We live in an information age where knowledge is power and money.  Science is our God.  Yet, knowledge doesn’t always satisfy us or heal our hurts.  I have sat with many families who have had a loved one suddenly die in our ER.  A doctor would then come in with all the scientific facts of what happened or what went wrong, and you know what, it didn’t help, because their loved one was still dead.  In fact, this information usually goes in one ear and out the other!  Knowing is not a panacea for all our ills, nor is it the substance of faith, something all these Bible knowledge, Bible worshiping churches haven’t figured out yet.                 

             I am hear today to tell you that Thomas got a bad rap with his nickname.  Thomas is elsewhere referred to as Didymus, or the twin.  Who was his twin? I don’t know who he was, but I know who he is.  You are, and I am.  All of us boneheads unite, because the disciple that has been immortalized in art, song and history as the quintessential doubter is our twin brother!  But the good news is, its OK.  For the opposite of faith is not doubt, but fear.  It is fear that paralyzes us from action, when we understand faith rightly as a verb, not a noun.  Fear paralyzes us because faith is a mystery and not quantifiable.  Faith is a step into the dark, yea a leap, that lands us into the light.  But we have to jump in the dark if we are ever to experience the warm, loving light of the risen Christ.  I love the story even though it sounds like a made-up preacher story of the man who pushed the wheelbarrow over the high wire in a circus.  He struggled and wobbled, but he made it to the other side.  He asked the crowd if they believed that he could push the wheelbarrow across the high wire with a person setting in the wheelbarrow.  The crowd murmured, and thought “Sure, if a person sat real still, he could do it, ‘cause we just saw him walk with an empty wheel barrow and do it.  So the performer replied, OK, who wants to volunteer to get in the wheelbarrow?  Of course no one did.  Whatever keeps us from getting in the wheelbarrow with God keeps us from faith.  Whatever keeps us from getting into the wheel barrow is not usually doubt, but fear. We fear the truth about God and about ourselves.  We fear the will of God and where it might take us.  We fear that serving Christ might be too great a sacrifice on our lifestyles.  We fear that following Christ might mean that we end up in a little church with little strength and no ski trips for the youth or trips to Branson for, well you know who.  We fear that we will sell out to Christ, and that we might just be crucified for being different.

            Thomas’ great down-falling wasn’t that great.  He only believed what he wanted to believe, and we as his twins do the same every single day.  But if the gospel of John doesn’t communicate anything else, it communicates that Jesus helps us in our unbelief, just as he met Thomas where he was.  Thomas was a strong man, a leader, no doubt.  Tradition has it that he went to India as a missionary, and introduced Christianity to that continent where he was eventually martyred for the faith.  But as so often is the case, his strength became his weakness.  But it was at that point that the risen Christ came to him.  No wonder Paul said that his strength is made perfect not in out abilities, not in our talents or gifts, or not in our strength.  But his strength was made perfect in our weakness!  Thomas never did feel the nail prints in his side, it wasn’t necessary.  And what Thomas said was truly revolutionary.

            “My Lord, and My God!  My Lord AND MY GOD!! The most explicit reference to the deity of Christ in any of the gospels.  Thomas knew that Jesus was God.  No one else, no one, makes this claim or confession anywhere in the gospel of John.  A great confession indeed.  And John saved the best thing that anyone ever said about Jesus for last.  The greatest insight, the greatest revelation, the greatest thing said about Christ in any of the gospels came from one who has been stuck with the nickname of “Doubting” for two millennium.

            But the truth is, and what Thomas must have realized, is that “show me” signs are never enough, and the world is full of false ones anyway.  Thomas experienced the love of the risen Christ, and that love is not reasonable, not rational, you can’t explain it, you only experience it through faith. 

            So maybe we who are his spiritual twins will on occasion because of our glimpse of the risen Christ, climb in the wheelbarrow.  You will have to if you are going to make the great confession that Thomas made, you really can’t do it any other way.  You will have to if you want to be all God wants you to be.  You will have to if God is to bless this church we call Providence.  If you do so, whatever other monikers you might have, we will have to add “the faithful” to them.