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The Bible doesn’t say anything about St. Thomas’s background, but I think he was probably from Missouri. Missouri is the “Show Me State,” populated apparently by people who are hard to fool; some skeptical folks like to say, “I’m from Missouri, show me,” no matter where they are actually from. We Americans like to think of ourselves as hard-headed and practical, people like Sgt. Joe Friday from the old Dragnet TV series. If you’ve ever seen an episode of this show, you might have heard his famous line, always addressed to an hysterical woman, “Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.” This is sound reasoning, and also scientific thinking. The scientific principle of basing theories on physical evidence rather than hearsay is so natural in the modern world that we rarely think twice about it – of course, we think, the only way to make sure a statement is true is to test it against the facts as rigorously as possible. Thomas, then. is more like us than we might want to admit. He is reluctant to accept the news of the Resurrection unless, like a scientist, he has the physical data: he wants to touch the wounds made by the nails, and put his hand in the gash in Jesus’ side. He doesn’t disbelieve the other disciples, and surely he wants to believe that the Lord has somehow returned from death, but he cannot overcome his doubts even though he has followed Jesus through most of his ministry and watched him heal the sick and the blind and the crippled and even return Lazarus to life. The divided state of his mind must have been terrible, and in his place my mind would have been equally divided between hope and the fact that the other disciples had no evidence to back up their outrageous claim. And, of course, it was an outrageous claim; in Thomas’s defense, let’s think for a moment about what they were asking him to believe, not only that Jesus was alive but that he seemed able to walk through walls. This is a lot to believe. For one thing, there was no doubt that Jesus hadn’t faked his death, like Elvis; the Romans were nothing if not thorough, and when Jesus was taken down from the Cross he was dead indeed. As for the upper room, it was, well, upstairs, so Jesus didn’t climb in the window, and the door was locked. This scenario is like one of those British murder mysteries in which the body is found inside a locked room with no way to get in or out without leaving a lot of clues. Even Sherlock Holmes would have been baffled. Thomas’s doubt was surely understandable, especially to us who also look for facts and proof. I, at least, would have suspected that maybe the other disciples wanted so much to see Jesus again that they were sharing a kind of collective hallucination. No doubt there’s a description of something like this in the psychiatric literature. Somehow (and How is a good question) Jesus is aware of Thomas’s doubts, and the next time he appears he singles him out, saying “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Jesus’ comment reminds me of all the times he said to those he healed, “Your faith has made you well.” These people believed before he performed the miracle, not after he had demonstrated his power unmistakably. Thomas didn’t get a blessing because his rational skepticism was stronger than his faith. As children of the Enlightenment, we too have to struggle against the temptation to think much more than we feel, and to try to explain everything in the world by reason alone, aided only by the facts, ma’am. Jesus himself often discussed the power of faith: Faith can move mountains, he said, and faith is like a mustard seed that grows into a plant thousands of times larger than itself. Unless you are like a little child, he said, you shall not enter the kingdom of Heaven; that is, unless you trust and believe in Christ, you shall never experience the pure joy of the kingdom. You can’t think your way in. One phrase Jesus never used but that we now use frequently is “leap of faith.” Done properly, the leap of faith is a leap into the unknown, where no bottom is visible and the bottom may not exist. You have to let go of everything that we use to keep from falling into that abyss: our rationality, our knowledge, our common sense, our habit of saying, “I’m from Missouri, show me.” Only when we let go completely, trusting God to catch us before the leap becomes an endless fall, can we learn to trust and love him like a little child. Just letting go, however, is not enough. When we come to truly believe in God’s love and redemptive power, we will naturally act on our faith. Faith without acts is an abstraction, but when we live our faith it will transform us: we will learn to see the image of God in every person, and experience directly the divine love that surrounds us. As St. Paul wrote, a person in Christ is “a new creation.” This does not mean, though, that we have to give up our faith in reason. Some prominent atheists, most of them scientists, believe that there is a big gap between rational thinking and irrational feeling, with faith in an otherwise obscure man who lived nearly two thousand years ago definitely on the irrational side of the gap. In fact, if we look at our faith in purely rational terms it is, like the story the other disciples told to Thomas, a lot to believe. Outside the Bible, there are only a couple of fleeting references to Jesus – not much evidence, certainly not much underpinning for the two thousand years of faith that followed his death. The problem for these worshipers at the Temple of Reason is that they don’t recognize any way of thinking, of perceiving the creation, except their own. On the other hand, religious people like the fundamentalists who insist against all the evidence that the universe is only six thousand years old seem to believe that thinking is sinful. Of course neither side is balanced, and in any case there is no real conflict between science and religion – after all, our Presiding Bishop is also a marine biologist. Far less is there any conflict between using the minds God gave us to think and the hearts he gave us to love. Thomas was not alone, though in a way he was far ahead of his time in insisting on empirical data. Peter found himself walking on water across the Sea of Galilee, and when started losing his faith he promptly started to sink. I would have sunk too, and I would have asked for some hard evidence before I believed Peter and the others. Lord, help my unbelief, our unbelief, and let us become, in you, new creations. Amen.