I love liturgy. What I love about it is that there is something for everyone. I work with a group where a lot of people have experienced church hurt or are otherwise imagining what their faith could look like or how to reengage it. I am asked about liturgy quite often. Will it work for me? Yes! There is space for joy and there is space for grief. There is space for celebration and space for contrition. And there are ways to engage just about all of our senses. We hear the gorgeous music. We feel the water that’s being asperged in remembrance of baptism. We smell the sweet incense that filled the Sanctuary. We taste the wine and the bread.
I also have a little theory that liturgy engages all the ways that we can worship. For those with an education background, it’s a bit like pedagogy. Some of us learn from music and liturgy gives us that. Some of us learn through hearing, and the reading of the scripture and the homily gives us that. Some of us learn by seeing, and maybe you find that in watching the way we move through mass, almost like a dance. And some of us learn through movement. And in liturgy we get to move; we get to stand and sit and kneel and cross ourselves and genuflect. I think that we worship in a variety of ways just like we learn a variety of ways.
The Resurrection narrative shows that God cares about good pedagogy. This week, we hear the story of Thomas. Poor doubting Thomas. The disciple gets a bad rep. I really think it’s undeserved though.
This isn’t a disciple who gave up. Sure, he wasn’t there with the other disciples when Jesus appeared to them in the upper room. And, yes he did doubt what the disciples said. But he kept showing up. Showing up isn’t the sign of someone who’s given up on what they believe. It is the sign of someone who knows that there is something happening here and keeps showing up to find out what that is. Thomas is putting himself in a way of grace. He is also asking for nothing more than was given to the other disciples.
I think that we can follow the Resurrection story and see all of these different types of learning. We have John, who arrives at the tomb and looks around and believes. He is our logical or mathematical learner. He looks at the evidence in front of him, the rollaway tomb, the folded burial linens. He remembers what Jesus had said. He adds this all up and comes to the logical conclusion that what Jesus said is, in fact, true and he accepts it and returns.
We have Mary Magdalene. She is our auditory learner. She believes once she hears her name. She is the first to put herself in the way of Grace, but she does not yet understand. She sees Jesus as she’s weeping. Perhaps her tears obscure her vision. Perhaps she sees his dirty fingernails, maybe with the dirt from the grave, and mistakes it for the dirt of the new life of a gardener. She does not recognize Christ at this point. It is not until Jesus says her name that she is called into belief.
We have the other disciples who are gathered in that upper room when Jesus appears. They are our sight learners. They see and believe.
Later on Jesus makes an interesting statement to Thomas. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. I don’t think that this is condemning Thomas or praising the other disciples for believing upon sight. I think that it’s recognizing that we all come to believe through different means.
Now we come to our kinesthetic learners. That’s Thomas. Thomas learns by touching. “Unless, I put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” So Jesus allows that to happen.
In the Easter story, Jesus doesn’t just hope for the best, that one means of teaching will be enough to reach everyone. He presents the Resurrection through logic and through sight and through sound and through touch.
I’ve always had an affinity for Thomas. For a long time, I thought that’s because I sometimes doubted my faith. Another way that I connect with Thomas is that I am a kinesthetic learner. As I’ve grown more into my faith, I’ve hoped to be so bold as Thomas was to demand more from God. God show me. God shows up for Thomas. God meets Thomas where he is at. God shows Thomas in the way that he needs to learn and to believe.
God cares about pedagogy.
God met Thomas there. God provided a way for Thomas to believe in the Resurrection through kinesthetic learning, through the sense of touch.
Doubting Thomas. The disciple with the bad rep. But there’s something interesting that happens after Thomas gets to touch Jesus. Thomas is the first person to recognize that Jesus is God.
Peter recognized Jesus as the Messiah on the mountaintop at the Transfiguration. The centurion calls him the Son of God at the crucifixion. Mary calls him teacher at the Resurrection.
But Thomas says “my Lord and my God.” Thomas is the first to recognize the true divinity of Christ. I don’t know about you but I think we should call him “Thomas the believer” or “Thomas the new theologian.”
Let’s embrace all the ways that we learn and worship. It might just reveal something new to us.
Church history tells us that Thomas went on to evangelize throughout Western Asia and into India. I imagine, as he left his home culture behind, that his appreciation for different learning styles and his firm knowledge that God would meet him where he was at with what he needed bolstered his confidence as he encountered new people and new cultures. God would meet these people where they are at in the ways that they needed.
There’s so much good news in the Easter story. And I think one of those little pieces of good news that’s often overlooked is that God meets us where we are at. God cares about good pedagogy. God cares about the way that you learn, the way that you connect with the Divine, the way that you worship.
As we are entrusted to curate the space of worship around us, I think that it’s good to keep all of these characters of a Resurrection story in mind and how they learned, how they connected with the Divine, how they recognized the Christ. What can we do to make a dynamic space for others to connect with the Divine? How does our liturgy make room to draw in all the ways we worship and learn? And finally, as we prepare to leave this space, how can we take Christ out into the world in all the ways that Christ met his disciples?
Amen.
