2nd Sunday of Easter 2026

Sermon: 2nd Sunday of Easter 2026

Texts: John 20:19-31; 1 Peter 1:3-9

Grace, Peace, and Mercy from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Doubt can often be an agonizing word in the life of faith. We are often told to avoid it. Alas, we are but human beings. Doubts creep even in days we think we are strong, They remind us, that our minds are changeable, vulnerable to the winds of life; they can move one way one day and move the opposite direction the other. Doubt can breed uncertainty, anxiety, and sometimes despair. Yet, despite all that, doubt is not the opposite of faith. Faith’s opposite might as well be hopelessness. But doubt is simply standing in the shadows of life’s great challenges, it is sometimes the reaction of our vulnerable inner selves, looking for the shield of certainty. Perhaps we can reassess doubt in the same way Jesus embraced and did not leave behind doubting Thomas. The American writer and minister Frederick Buechner once wrote that doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. Sometimes, the power of faith is made stronger by the waves of

doubts that we thought might overwhelm us. In this sense, doubts can make faith more nimble, more flexible, more yearning, they can propel us into deeper wells of faith. For doubts are simply that, thoughts of not knowing. Faith, on the other hand, allows us to live above the not knowing by trusting. We tell Jesus, “I don’t know how I’m going to do this” and our faith rises from within saying: “but I will trust you”. “I don’t know all the whys, wheres, or hows of this life”, “but I will trust you, for You created me and love me and are for me and my neighbor.” Like Thomas, his doubt eventually led to that fateful touch of the wounds of Jesus. His doubts did not make Jesus appear to Him any less than any of those who did not doubt. Such is the grace of our God. We are able to believe because through whispers of doubts, sings a voice of trust in the promises of God’s Kingdom. While we doubt with the natural fears, with our restless reason, there stands a constant voice: “Do not doubt, but believe”. It is a harmony that is in solidarity with our condition, and wants to make us see the wideness of

God’s love, despite our doubting fears. And in the end, doubts can come and go, our faith may be big or small, yet God’s faithfulness never waivers. His promises remain the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. His grace does not depend on the weakness or strength of our believing, God in Jesus Christ stands eternally as God for us. Faith then is that activity in our life when we are open to the possibilities of God’s grace to spring up throughout our human lives. As it says in 1 Peter: “By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you… In this you rejoice, even if now for a little while you have had to suffer various trials”.

Indeed, it is a living hope, that supports our existence in this world, which reminds us of everything that is good forever, that love is more powerful than death, that God who is Love and Mercy, triumphs over the finite powers of this world. And we see that living hope alive today across the whole church in so many

different contexts and tribulations. I’ve been inspired for example, by the living hope of someone like the Rev. Sally Azar, the first Palestinian woman ordained as pastor in the Lutheran Church of Jordan and the Holy Land. She was recently speaking on the current Palestinian experience in the West Bank. Rev. Azar was remarking on something as ordinary as driving to work and then back home, in looking for your children in school, going to visit a sick family member at another town. These ordinary things are unjustly made difficult for regular people. Hundreds of checkpoints have been established across the whole West Bank, making daily driving between towns a living purgatory, not to mention all the variables in between, like maintenance checks that lasts months, making the traffic worse at the other checkpoints. What should take no time at all, can last hours of waiting to be cleared to pass. Rev. Azar recounted how she had to wait in the car 7 hours at a checkpoint, the woman who was with her had to call family members to pick her son from school, because she could not reach him in time. Things like these, Rev.

Azar says, are made to diminish people on the inside. This is not a natural sense of doubt, but a corrosive hostile one, provoked by the powers of this world to afflict spiritually and physically. The doubt that diminishes is meant to bring us down, to break us. It is precisely what the Roman authorities and the religious elites did to Jesus and His followers. The cross was meant to sow doubt, and scatter them into oblivion. But this doubt does not have the final word. Rev. Azar ends by saying: “We do not survive that without our hope, and our hope lies within our faith”.

Beloved, that is the power of the Resurrection at work in the church. That in the face of the doubts that can come from all sides, in the face of the diminishment, our faith which is rooted in the living hope of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, strengthens us to endure the trials and tribulations of this world. That even in the face of injustice, we can represent God’s alternative to the world, and proclaim that the alternative of

peace, justice, mercy and love will triumph. Such is the living hope of the Easter message. Such was the experience of our doubting brother Thomas! He was gripped by the fear of disappointment, of being diminished, to not believe and follow his brothers unless he saw the risen Jesus himself, wounds and all. Jesus appears to Thomas, and shows him the evidence. The Risen Jesus awakens in Thomas his living hope, it brings back up his faith. And we ourselves, although we have not seen him, we love Jesus, and therefore we receive this same gift! We can be empowered away from diminishment, our hope allows us to remain steadfast, and because we love this Jesus, our doubts are opportunities to simply trust God with our lives and let the life of Jesus shine through us. Thus also, our Palestinian brothers and sisters show us that doubts are not the end of faith, but that faith is a gift we can exercise in the face of doubt, that God is ever present to our sufferings and redeems every day as a chance to live out the values of Christ in our world, the values that keep us close to the kingdom of God. Those 7 hours,

unjust as they are, become reflective instead of the vitality and steadfastness of faith in God’s love and His Kingdom, the rightness of the cause of those who are oppressed. Faith is an invitation to live today the fact that Jesus is Risen, and we are part of a long line of witnesses to His name, and therefore the world is no longer the same. We can keep bending the arch of the moral universe towards justice and love and withstand the bout with the forces of hopelessness.

This steadfastness of faith against hopelessness is made more powerful when we see that the risen Christ is recognizable through His wounds, and that His resurrected presence does not hide the wounds He bore. Often we want to paint perfect pictures, but God does not dwell in denial. God lives in the thick of reality, and thus His presence is known to those who have suffered. He Himself does not hide His own sufferings, He shows them, He invites us to touch the wounds and see Him as He is through them. God shows up with His own wounded story, as if

saying, I also bare scars. The risen Christ would not be the Jesus the disciples knew if He didn’t have His wounds. The wounded Jesus is the resurrected Jesus. The path of hopefulness and resurrection is often a road where we are confronted with the wounds of the world, and we might end up wounded ourselves, for to love is to be vulnerable, is to expose oneself to the dangers of diminishment, to go through doubts and uncertainty. To have faith is to hold fast then to the promises of God, the fact that He holds us within it all, as He went through it all on the cross. It also reminds us, that the risen Christ wants us to see Him through the wounds, that means, that the church is called to witness to Christ in the wounds of the world. Where are the wounded ones? Who is beaten down? Where is the hurt? For by witnessing and mending these wounds, we imitate our brother Thomas when he encountered the risen Jesus. We can say My Lord and My God and realize that the God of Life is inviting us to be a healing balm in the world, to bring the spirit of the resurrection where the wounds are present. And not as ones

who are perfect, but as wounded healers ourselves. To see that God uplifts and strengthens the downcast, that He is for them. Our Easter joy is then made complete, that nothing can truly separate us from God, nothing at all. No spirit of destruction can wrest us away from Him, He is with us, and from within us He is shining a light on the Risen World He is bringing about. Your presence here, is a testament to that, you perhaps are not aware, in how many ways God makes Himself evident through each of your lives. Yes through your good deeds, but especially, through your mended wounds, and your forgiven sins. May God keep us steadfast in love and faith! Let us pray: