John 20: 24-28; I Peter 1: 8,9

Fear of fraud

It’s the week after Easter and we go from the zenith of faith in God to the shame of the doubt of Thomas.  We don’t think of him highly, although he is a distant candidate for our disappointment compared to Judas.   We are ambivalent.  In a way we love Thomas, we’re happy he’s in the Bible, because he makes us feel a little less bad.  If even a disciple doubted the resurrection of Jesus, then, two thousand years later, we’re not so bad.  We usually think of Thomas in terms of doubt, but we could also look at it differently and approach his story from the vantage point of “fraud.”  There are two aspects to that fraud. One is the fraud Thomas feels when it comes to the story of Jesus’ return.  The second is the fraud he must feel of himself.  The same is true of us: we fear that our faith is a fraud and because we fear our faith is a fraud we come to church and feel like a fraud. In the new book “The Confidence Code,” Katty Kay and Claire Shipman write how people in the workplace and other settings so often have to fight off their insecurity and lack of confidence.  They often feel they are not up to the task they have been chosen for and they feel they are “winging it.” They wind up thinking they are a fraud.

Thomas is on end of the spectrum of faith, the low end that is.  As one of Jesus’ chosen disciples he is likely to feel like a fraud.  On the other end of the spectrum are the people addressed  in I Peter:  they are full of faith in spite of never having seen Jesus.  Compared to those people Thomas looks even more like a fraud.

Friends, maybe we shouldn’t beat ourselves up too much.  The world and people around us teach us that we must pay attention,  that we should be cautious that people don’t take us for a ride, that they don’t double charge us or overcharge us or pull the wool over our eyes.  Recently on the coast of Spain a beautiful skyscraper went up in Benidorm, the tallest in a region resort towns.  It was supposed to be twenty stories tall, but the architects fell so in love with their building that they added another 27 stories, topping the building out at 47.  There was only one catch.  The elevators only went up to the twentieth floor, leaving the rest of the floors to people in very good shape and with lots of time on their hands.  We are taught to be watchful of people who are cheating us, of schemes and conspiracies.  So how can we drop all of that, walk into church and believe everything?  Still we feel a bit like a fraud for thinking like that.

Garrison Keillor, the host of Prairie Home Companion writes:”I came to church as a pagan this year, though wearing a Christian suit and white shirt, and sat in a rear pew with my sandy-haired gap-toothed daughter whom I like to see grow up in the love of the Lord, and there I was, a skeptic in a henhouse, thinking weaselish thought.  This happens around Easter: God in a humorous way, sometimes schedules high holidays  for a time when your faith is at low tide, a mud flat strewn with newspapers and children’s toys, and while everyone else is all joyful and shiny among the lilies and praising up a storm, there you are, snarling and grumbling. Which happened to me this year. God knows all about it so I might as well tell you: Holy Week is a good time to face up to the question: Do we really believe in that story or do we just hang out with nice people and listen to organ music? There are advantages, after all, to being in the neighborhood of people who love their neighbors. If your car won’t start on a cold morning, you’ve got friends…” (Homiletics March/April 2014) Friends, Garrison Keillor feels a bit like a fraud.

The theologian Walter Brueggemann writes: We spent our lives struggling with faith, sometimes struggling for faith, sometime struggling against faith. Faith always has it its say among us. It will not go away. Its voice is a haunting one. And in it we hear the very voice of God….We have haunted lives filled with yearnings for what is not in hand, promises not yet filled, commands not yet obeyed, desires not yet granted, neighbors not yet loved. And because faith not go away or be silent, we are destined to be endlessly haunted, uneasy, restless on the way.” (Clergy Journal, May/June 2001).   We fear that we are frauds.

Friends, we struggle with our faith in other people because we are afraid of being defrauded, we struggle with our faith in ourselves and with our faith in God and found up feeling like a fraud.   Maybe it just keeps us smart and honest.  But let us feel comforted that before God we can be ourselves, for God knows us and loves as we are. There is no need for us to pretend or to hide before God.  God has us figured out. Thanks be to God.