One of my favorite biblical characters of the New Testament is Thomas, the doubting Apostle. Thomas’ appraisal of the circumstances surrounding the supposed “resurrection” of Jesus is a familiar discourse of thought, fear and ultimately resignation of faith. Thomas gets a bad reputation for being the only doubting disciple. Unlike Peter and John, Thomas wasn’t afforded an opportunity to see the empty tomb for himself. Unlike the others, Thomas wasn’t there when Jesus broke bread and revealed himself to the household and quickly disappeared. So is it any wonder then, that Thomas was skeptical of all these things. Thomas had it in his mind that it wasn’t fair that the others got to see, and belligerently and in an almost childlike disdain for the other’s opportunity to see Jesus, he refuses and says he will not believe until he sees it for himself. When Jesus takes him up on this opportunity, Thomas gets a lecture in faith, hope and ultimately patience. Thomas wanted a tangible reason to believe that his hopes and dreams had not been wasted on this radical rabbi and his movement of peace and passionate love for broken, dying, misshapen, misdirected, misplaced people.

Like Thomas, I and many people I know, have little room left for intangibles…maybe my age, my lot in life, or even the circumstances that have brought me to this point of life have deadened or hardened my ability to put stock in the unconfirmed, enigmatic or distant dreams of a childlike faith. It is quite possible that I’ve learned to put more stock in the proverbial “one in the hand is better than two in the bush” philosophy that teaches us to depend on what we have rather than what we could have. Call it a Gen-X disillusionment that denies the viability of dreams and employs a passion for having a faith based on sight, experience and empirical understanding. The matter of fact is that many people in my generation do not truly possess a hope for a future that has anything worth hoping for. Sadly, I am a Gen-Xer to the core. I have little faith in government or established institutions of society, I have little hope that life will get any better than it is now. Hope, for my generation, is a pipe dream; almost as distant in our minds as Thomas’ ability to believe Jesus was alive having not seen it for himself.

Again, like Thomas, we need tangibles in our lives that mean something. True, Jesus did say that those who were able to believe with out sight were better off because they have more faith, better hope than those who need to have the world studied, identified, classified and understood in order to truly have hope for tomorrow. Thomas’ refrain is reminiscent of the pain of many people who have been left to struggle in a world where details about their basest human needs are desperately hidden away to avoid the risky behavior of blind faith, childlike hope and altruistic love.

Today’s scripture reading is about hope…it is the kind of hope that most people are looking for, a hope to have something real to touch, real to hold on to…something real enough to put stock into for the future. In a sermon I delivered a few weeks ago, we were reminded from scripture that we are called to be people of hope, people who bring hope to others, regardless of cost, regardless of consequences. Our identity then is tied to this calling. We are called to be bearers of hope through the vehicle of unrestricted, self denying love. Now, I am a cynic at heart…so I know how cliché the word love can sound to a generation who feels hopeless about its own ability to love one another. Today’s text describes to us that if we are people of God, then we obviously love God and in turn will love what God loves. We live in one of the most religiously affluent areas of the world and are surrounded by people who ache, who hurt, who long for peace and stillness from the storms of life. We have churches on every corner and the dispossessed and disenfranchised in every pew…people seeking a touchstone of hope and finding nothing but rules, shame, belittlement and the most common kinds of indecencies.

So then, how are we guilty of denying hope to those in most need of something to live for. If we say we love God, and offer not a drink of water to the least among us…we have taken away their hope. If we confess to be people of compassion, people who feel called to exemplify the live of Jesus, and we deny another’s right to exist because they do not fit into our categories or cannot be empirically studied and forced to align themselves with our “norms” we are what the Apostle John calls a liar. To John, a liar was a person with a false faith. John uses the word from the Greek that describes one who confesses to love God and does not exercise love with those around them. John combines the words for false, pseudo, and faith, pisteo, to show how serious one must take their confessions of faith. John uses the word to described those who live without love for their brothers and sisters while claiming to love God. These hope stealers are people who claim to have God in their hearts, but have little of God in their interactions with people on a daily basis. John sees how dangerous it is for the church, who is called to the bearers of hope to the world, to live hypocritical lives by denying love to the most desperate of people in the world. Desperation isn’t just a global disaster, but a local catastrophe that plagues the church in every place and time because we are hope stealers extraordinaire! We claim to have a hope in Jesus Christ that promises to change the dry, dusty and parched parts of the soul into a watered garden of Eden that drips with the dew of new beginnings. Then, in almost the same breath that offers them hope, we offer condemnation, we offer rules and instill fear into their lives saying words like God hates or God punishes! In doing so, we steal their hope away, condemning them to live a life of intangible grief. But the text today says clearly, if we claim to love God whom we have not seen, and deny love to those we have in our very midst, we are liars, people with a false faith that deny hope and instills fear into the lives of the desperate and broken of our community. But we are capable of much more, called to a higher purpose, an existence far above the long lists of do’s and don’ts, it’s an existence where love, tangible love wins out over categorical distractions of fear inflicting rules and brings us to see God as God truly is…the intangible God of tangible grace! Do you want to touch God? Do you want to see God? Do you want to experience God? Then touch the broken, the sick, the lonely, the defeated and the parched ! Where are they? They sit beside you in your pew. They talk with you daily at work. They ring up your purchases at the grocer. The hopeless surround us, the permeate our lives! We are hear so that they may experience a tangible hope. Will you be Jesus’ representative to them. Will you show them the scars in his hands? Will you put their hands into the wounds in his feet? Will you show them intangible God of tangible hope?

Amen!