Doubting Thomas Sermon

     In churches that follow the common lectionary, the story of Doubting Thomas is always the reading for the Sunday after Easter.  If you grew up in such a church you probably heard the story as a lesson that if we were properly strong in our faith we would not ask for evidence.  There is another way to see it. Thomas is not really asking for more than the other disciples already had received.  No one tells Thomas that he is wrong to question, instead the other disciples accept his need for what they have experienced.  It isn’t fair to call him Doubting Thomas as if he was somehow weak in his faith.  Instead, we should value Thomas as the person willing to ask questions.  During the Last Supper Jesus says “You know the way to the place where I am going” and only Thomas is brave enough to say: “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus replied: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”  I don’t know that Thomas would have been satisfied by the answer but it is one that we cherish.  So we should be thankful for Thomas’s honesty and take him as an inspiration that it is ok to have questions and doubts.

But I want to focus on a different aspect of the story.  I did not grow up going to church and when I first paid attention to this story I heard something entirely different in it.  I had started to go to a church that emphasized Holy Week and saw Easter as journey in which we turn a corner from darkness to light.   Experiencing Easter that way and then going to church the next Sunday and hearing the story of Doubting Thomas, what struck me about the story was the touching of wounds.  I felt, wow, Jesus knows what it's like to be human to the point where he wanted his wounds to be touched.  I was reading into the story my own wishes for others to recognize my wounds but it also struck me as vulnerability and trust.  In the classic painting by Caravaggio Thomas is literally putting his hand into the wound, guided by Jesus holding his arm.  Jesus is inviting Thomas into his woundedness.

That was clearly a reading that had more to do with my own loneliness than with scholarship, but the story became very special to me because I felt it that way.  Then one year I went to church on the Sunday after Easter and heard a different interpretation. I don't remember where this was or who was preaching--I don't think it was that the pastor of my own church.  But the sermon I heard that day about Doubting Thomas said that if you read the text carefully, Jesus invites Thomas to touch his words but the text does not tell you that Thomas touched Jesus.  This minister explained the interpretation that Thomas has not needed to touch Jesus's wounds, it was enough to be invited to do exactly what he had asked for.  Thomas immediately replied to the invitation with the words: “My Lord and my God.” As further evidence, the minister said that afterwards Jesus asks “Have you believed because you have seen me?” He doesn’t ask “Have you believed because you have touched me?” 

In fact, the story that has come down to us doesn’t specify what happened.   There's no confirmation in the text that Thomas actually touched, but I'm not convinced by an argument from the absence of evidence.  My first reaction, when I heard that interpretation for the first time, was dismay, even horror.  Here was a story that meant a great deal to me and someone was saying that the detail that meant so much to me wasn’t in the story at all.  I felt like something precious to me had been taken away.  I decided okay, that may be one possible interpretation but I'm not going to believe it, it doesn't work for me that way.  I didn't grow up with the idea that there had to be one right interpretation so it felt okay to me to reject that particular interpretation as not the one I needed.  These stories are in the Bible for how they may speak more deeply to us.

I didn’t dig into the history of the different interpretations until I was preparing to talk about it to you today.  What I found was that the traditional Catholic interpretation is that Thomas touched the wounds, as a series of dramatic Renaissance paintings show.  The Catholic Church valued physical confirmations of faith, such as relics and pilgrimages.  This morning, when the Pope preached on this text, he spoke of Jesus inviting us to touch his wounds and enter into the mystery of his merciful love.  He emphasized that this story shows us Jesus generous enough to offer whatever Thomas needs.

On the other side, the Gnostics, an early group of believers who ended up being declared heretics, took a different approach.  They de-emphasized the body reality of Jesus, because they saw the body and the whole physical world as fallen or even evil.  They insisted that Thomas did not actually touch Jesus, in fact could not because the resurrected Jesus had a purely spiritual body, not a physical body.  They turned the absence of evidence into proof.

The Protestant reformation many years later took a somewhat different path to a similar interpretation.  One central belief of the reformers was that salvation comes from God’s grace alone, not from good works.  Faith becomes central, not action, and so Luther argued that Thomas had found faith without the work of actually needing to touch the wounds.  Thomas does not achieve faith by his own action, but from Jesus reaching out to offer what Thomas wanted.  Thomas doesn’t have to do anything or even ask for anything; Jesus knows Thomas’s needs and gives grace freely and undeserved.  The words: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe” were interpreted as a blessing on those who believe simply on the basis of the words of the Bible, don’t need saints and miracles. 

But I don’t want to fall into being a historian here, I want to try to draw you into what this story means to me.  It may mean something very different to you, but I hope my experience of it will enrich yours.

I was someone who grew up with many wounds and my approach was to hide them.  I had a head start in that because my family looked good on the outside and believed in not showing feelings. The advantages to hiding wounds is that it helps reduce being re-victimized and I was able to get some stability in my life.  The disadvantage for people who take that approach is that we end up feeling nobody is willing to see the pain inside.   We hide our pain so effectively that other people think we have it all together even when we don't. 

I had a wonderful therapist when I started working on deep healing of my childhood wounds.  I went into a rant one day about how it was too hard to heal, too hard to learn to live my life differently.  I didn’t want to go any farther.  He said to me: “I will stay with you wherever you are.” He believed that there was something inside me that would move me towards healing, and he trusted that force even when it took us in strange directions. There were times when what I needed was for him to touch my wounds, and he did. 

As I came to feel like a changed person, I realized that I didn’t feel that I was being restored to some original self from before I was abused, I was becoming a deeper person because of those experiences and the journey of healing.  My wounds are a profound part of who I am.  When I began to speak of that, someone recommended to me that I read Henri Nouwen’s book “The Wounded Healer.” 

Nouwen’s book is mostly about ministers and the loss of security in our contemporary world.  It was first published in 1979 and responds to a nuclear age in which not only is the world menaced by nuclear weapons but also we are more isolated, have lost secure communities.  We are most of all, lonely.  We long for others to understand what we feel inside. 

Nouwen is very careful in his understanding of what it means to be a wounded healer.  He sees it as not about telling our own stories, but about being able to hold and share the other person’s pain because we have gone through something like it ourselves.  And giving the other person the space to own their own pain and come to an acceptance that can be shared.  Nouwen says that shared pain is a way to newness of life if we can stay aware of the presence of a God who is already with us wherever we may be, whose woundedness is a source of healing.  We come back again to the cycle of darkness and light. 

Easter is not just one day, but a season when the story of Jesus’s death and resurrection is a smooth stone I turn over and over in my hand.  One perspective on the cross and the resurrection is that Jesus had to die in order to suffer all the pain that human beings can suffer, so that we might know that Jesus can share our feelings whatever pain and loneliness we may feel. When we are in pain, we often find comfort in stories of people who have gone through something similar and become better people for it.  Jesus was not spared the suffering of being human.  Remember that the story tells us that Jesus is resurrected with his wounds still present.  Salvation is not about erasing suffering but about transforming it, redeeming it.  Jesus shows his wounds to show us that Jesus does know what it is to be wounded and alone.  And that ultimately, our deep pain has the potential to be transformed into wisdom and connection and richer lives. 

It is an odd approach to think about God as being vulnerable, yet to me Jesus resurrected with his wounds is a symbol not just of humanness but also a symbol of willingness to be vulnerable.  A willingness to feel pain and to connect to other people's pain and be a wounded healer. And that we might in whatever way may be appropriate, touch each other’s wounds as Jesus touched many of those he healed and was even, perhaps, willing to be touched.  Over and over again, we walk through our own experiences of darkness and new life, and Jesus is walking with us.

 Written by Pam Mack and preached at Peace Church, Clemson SC, April 2015

Chestnut bread (grain free)

3 tblsp butter or oil of your choice, divided
1/2 cup buttermilk or whole milk or tea or almond milk
1 egg
1 tblsp maple syrup or honey
1 cup chestnut flour or 1/2 cup chestnut flour and 1/2 cup almond meal
1 tblsp coconut flour (optional)
scant 1/2 teasp salt
1/2 teasp baking powder (or baking soda if using buttermilk)
2 to 3 oz of shelled and peeled chestnuts (optional)

Preheat oven to 400 F.  Place butter in a 7 inch cast iron skillet and place in oven until melted.  Leave about 1 tblsp butter in the skillet, pour the rest into a food processor or powerful blender.  Add all other ingredients and blend until fairly smooth.  Pour into cast iron pan and bake for about 15 minutes, until a knife in the center comes out clean.   This has the texture of corn bread made with creamed corn; for a lighter texture add the tablespoon of coconut flour. For a 10 inch skillet, double the recipe and increase the baking time to 25 to 30 minutes.

Update on John

John is more unsteady on his feet.  He can still walk from the house to the car, but with two people to keep him upright.  What scared me most though was that he couldn't eat lettuce, had to pull it out of his mouth.  He said it wasn't a swallowing problem but not being able to move it around his mouth to chew it.  But if his tongue muscles are going, the swallowing muscles are too.

Elizabeth and I and John's wine friend David and Deborah King sat around after his birthday dinner (after he went back to the nursing home) and talked about what he soon wasn't going to be able to do.  I encouraged David to move towards having the wine dinners in the small dining room at the Downs; he said sometimes he has been scared John would fall when he was helping him in and out of the car. Elizabeth found a thermostatic control that will work for John's wine refrigerators, instead of his system of adjusting timers as the temperature of the basement changes.  We also talked about the swallowing problems, which David has seen, and that John's drinking fine wine would be over at the point where he has to have thickened liquids.

I brought the first two points up with John over the next several days.  He said that he didn't think a new control system for the refrigerators was needed this year, though he accepted my saying it would make me feel better.  He said David hadn't said anything to him about being uncomfortable about helping him in and out of the car. I didn't discuss thickening liquids--he would just say he isn't having swallowing problems.

Elizabeth and I talked about what might happen while she is away at school. We agreed that he is getting close to the point of losing quality of life and would not go to the hospital and probably not get further antibiotics if the first ones used don't work (no therapeutic escalation). She wants to come home when something happens, and we will try to have the funeral within a week.

It hurt to feel her pain facing such difficult things.  I also feel so torn between my own instinct to come to terms with and plan for the end and John's denial that he is losing quality of life. I find it hard to feel my feelings when I know he would tell me that they aren't accurate.

two sorrel recipes

Beef Shanks with Sorrel

about 2 lbs of sliced beef shank
scant 1 tblsp of the fat of your choice (I used bacon fat)
1 medium onion, halved and sliced medium thick
salt and pepper
1 tblsp ras el hanout seasoning
1/2 a preserved lemon (more or less as you prefer)
dried figs--either 8 small whole or fewer cut up
1 1/2 cups beef broth (if using canned you may want to use half broth, half water)
4-8 ounces sorrel leaves

Preheat oven to 325.  Sprinkle the beef shank with salt and brown in the fat in a dutch oven or oven-proof skillet.  Add the onion before removing from the heat so the onion has a chance to brown a little.  Remove from heat and sprinkle with pepper and ras el hanout seasoning.  Add the preserved lemon, diced, and the figs if you want to leave them whole.  Add the broth or liquid, which should come at least half way up the shanks, and bring to a boil.  Transfer to the oven, covered, and cook for two hours at 325.  Remove carefully from the oven, remove the shanks from the liquid, and immediately stir the sorrel into the liquid.  Sorrel will wilt down to almost nothing the way spinach does--it may work better to stir it in a large handful at a time.  Stir in figs if you are using them cut up.  Shred or cut up the meat from the beef shanks and add it and the marrow back to the liquid.  Reheat if needed and serve.

And for the leftover sorrel:

Sorrel and Celery Root Soup

1 quart chicken stock
2 small or 1 medium celery roots
4-8 oz sorrel leaves, cut up if large
some leftover chicken, diced
salt to taste

Peel and chop the celery root, then cook it in the chicken stock until soft.  Put the celery root pieces and some of the chicken stock in a blender or food processor and puree.  Return to the pot with the rest of the stock and heat to simmering.  Remove from heat and stir in the sorrel leaves and chicken meat.  Adjust seasoning and serve

Lactofermented Cranberry Relish

I love this in my smoothies.

4 cups organic cranberries, picked over
1 apple, peeled and cut up
3-6 dates, diced
1 knob of ginger, diced
1 teasp salt
2 tblsp honey

Process all ingredients except honey in a food processor until chopped fairly fine.  Pack tightly in a quart jar, leaving at least an inch of head space, and cover with a thin layer of honey.  Store in a dark place for four days or a week or more to ferment, then refrigerate.  (this recipe has been updated)

tough decision

I'm getting close to deciding John has to go into a nursing home, whether he agrees or not.  He would say can't he stay home with more help, but that doesn't seem realistic to me.

A couple of weeks ago he suddenly got much worse, unable to transfer at all (we basically had to lift him between chair or toilet and wheelchair).  We thought that might be a urinary tract infection and with antibiotics he got somewhat better.  But he didn't get back to where he was; he can occasionally use the walker but mostly he is in a wheelchair.  He has a lot of tremor in his hands; food ends up on the floor when he eats.  He spends many hours a day on the toilet: trying to urinate, dealing with constipation or diarrhea  (trying to avoid bowel incontinence), cleaning himself.  Occasionally he has to cath himself.

Unless it is a particularly good day, he can no longer heat up his own leftovers (or frozen prepared food) or make his own smoothie.  He is falling perhaps on average once a day, and fairly often it takes our son and I together to get him up.

If it was likely he only had a few months to live I would keep him home.  But it isn't clear what symptom he will die of.  The most likely one would be swallowing problems leading to pneumonia, but his swallowing isn't noticeably getting worse.

He desperately wants to be home.  We had a conversation with the hospice nurse, who felt he wasn't safe at home because of falls.  He proposed more help in the evening and also agreed to a monitoring camera so I can check on him.  He said "anything is better than what Pam is thinking." But what I am thinking is that I can no longer give him the care he needs.  He is not getting all the help he needs to sleep comfortably because I need to go to bed.  There aren't always going to be 2 of us here to pick him up.  He isn't taking his medicine much of the time unless I put it out for him.

Yesterday I had a bad sore throat and wanted to rest and stay away from him.  When he woke up I did push him into the bathroom and change his briefs and pants for him and get him icewater.  I think he was in the bathroom all afternoon. When I went downstairs to tell him I would bring him down his dinner he said he would fix himself something else to avoid my germs.  But then he sent Paul up for the stew I had made; he realized he couldn't manage getting himself something and he needed food.  He told me he did want me to get him ready for bed, but then he changed his mind when I said it needed to be at 8 pm because I needed to go to bed early. I was woken twice, though I didn't have to get up.  Once was by a phone call that John didn't get to, probably because he was in the bathroom again.  And once was by him calling for Paul, I'm guessing to help him get his pillows so he doesn't fall sideways over the arm of his recliner.

letting go of control

I haven't written here about personal struggles in a long time, but I have a feeling that this current one is going to be complicated enough that it will be useful to have a record and perhaps find people who want to talk about these issues.  The challenge I face is letting go of some control, but control makes me feel safe.  This is a challenge where I do want to learn to do it differently.

The immediate situation is that John has started on palliative care/hospice.  From the beginning six years ago his disease has been one that has no cure, nothing but treatment for symptoms.  But we settled into trying to maintain his quality of life.  I researched the disease and made suggestions.  Sometimes he refused, sometimes he resisted but then when he tried it told me I was right.  In the last year his decline has been faster and he has also been much more resistant.  When I asked the doctor about palliative care, I didn't expect that John would qualify for care funded by hospice, but he did.  What hospice means to me is a transition from him living with the disease to dying of the disease, though I say that with the expectation that he has 6 months to a year to live.  But I also realize that their job is to lead us through this process.

Today in church the sermon was about John 1:29-42 and the preacher noted that the first words Jesus says in John's gospel are "What are you looking for?" (John 1:38).  The sermon called for us to listen deeply to the answer to that question inside us and trust the journey.  I felt that fit with my thoughts about letting go of control. But where I got struck is that my first answer to what is my deepest yearning is “safety.” That comes from childhood experiences of abuse and my first father’s death in a car accident, which also makes me feel that God doesn’t protect us. So I had settled into an approach that the closest I can come to safety is trying to see what is coming down the road and figure out how to manage it as best as is possible. That kind of control has worked fairly well for me, so it is very hard to think about letting go of it even partially.

The letting go of control I imagine is letting go (though not completely) of my role as researcher and advocate.  I initially pushed hospice to arrange for John to continue physical therapy, though it turns out that his physical therapist was already thinking it was time to give up.  One motivation for pushing that was that it was important to John, but it was also a way of maintaining my role as the one who fights for what John needs.  I realized I need to some extent to let Hospice be the ones who know what John needs.  But then I have to face my own powerlessness instead of hiding it behind a front.

John is clearly continuing to decline--today he called me to put on his briefs for him, which he has been stubborn about doing himself.  He leans on my arm heavily when we go out, but he does still get out.  He doesn't seem like someone who is dying at this point, but he is increasingly vulnerable as his autonomic nervous system fails.  And he has been clear all along that he would like to die of something else before his quality of life is gone.