As the name of the drama suggests it is God who is on trial and the charge is essentially that God has let people down. In effect, God is in breach of contract and has failed to fulfil his covenant – his promise. One of the rabbis defends God, arguing that Auschwitz is a test of their faith.

A witness testifies that the people of his village loved God yet the Nazis came and shot the elderly and took the rest to concentration camps.

Another asks why, if God is so powerful, he doesn’t help his people? Someone retorts that God granted humans free will. The scientist argues God is an illusion and is used by rulers to exercise power. He warns that the Jewish people thought they were the chosen people, but they were wrong.

After all the evidence is in the judges confer and are about to announce their verdict when another rabbi speaks up. He launches into a series of questions that explore God's actions from the escape from Egypt to the present day.

This is a fascinating concept, especially since it is based on actual events in a concentration camp, recalled by the renowned author Elie Wiesel, a holocaust or Shoah survivor. If God is supposed to be loving and an active agent in the world, can we prove God’s innocence beyond a reasonable doubt? How would any of us define reasonable doubt, or reasonable faith for that matter? Of course many people wonder if there is a God at all, based on the evidence, and for Christians there is the additional challenge of answering whether God would enter into human existence in the person of Jesus.

Okay, you can all go home now! This morning, on this first Sunday after the great celebration of Easter we read about another Jew, a man named Thomas who was a disciple of Jesus, but couldn’t believe that Jesus had risen from the dead, at least not in the beginning. You know Thomas, aka Doubting Thomas. In this gospel, John’s gospel, he keeps showing up as an important player.

When Jesus is called to Bethany to heal Lazarus, Thomas is the one who says “sure let’s go, even if there is danger.” At the Last Supper when Jesus tells them all that he is leaving them and that they will know the way it is Thomas who pipes up and says “well, I don’t know the way.” His honesty is a catalyst for a deeper understanding of Jesus as the Christ.

And now a week after Jesus supposedly, allegedly, appeared to the rest of the disciples it is Thomas who says “I don’t think so.” He wasn’t there and he didn’t see it, so he wants proof. Wouldn’t you? In a way his doubt is entirely reasonable and even though the other disciples insist that it is true, Thomas maintains that he will not accept their “hearsay” until he has evidence, real fingers in the holes of Jesus’s hands and in his side. It is really a gory image if you stop to think about it, but isn’t this the sort of “over-the-top” statement people make when they want to make a point?

Thomas wants proof, beyond a reasonable doubt, and why not? In a way he is a first century man who is a very twenty first century person.

Do you think there is room for reasonable doubt in your faith? It seems as though the United Church is a denomination for doubters, because we have all manner of questions and different outlooks. People choose the United Church because there is freedom to ask those questions. Through the years I have been part of so many conversations with people who have expressed their doubts about many aspects of faith, including the resurrection. Some have been belligerent, some apologetic, most just honest. There have been more than a few who doubt because of their deep disappointment. They feel that God has been “in breach of contract,” not living up to the new covenant in Jesus Christ.

Come to think of it, it’s a little surprising that there aren’t more St. Thomas congregations because he could be the patron saint for many of us. But is doubt good or bad? The answer I’ll offer is probably a United Church answer – yes! There are times when doubt is extremely useful. No world view, whether it is Christian, or Jewish, or Islamic, or atheistic for that matter, can be conclusively proven. So we are constantly testing our own world view with questions and explorations which come under the category of doubt. That’s the good aspect of doubt.

We need to appreciate, though, that doubt can be a dead end. Sometimes I hear people say that in our denomination it is more important to ask the questions than it is to find the answers. They make it sound as though being in a constant state of uncertainty or indecisiveness is somehow noble. Can you imagine if you are searching unsuccessfully for a destination and you pull into a gas station and ask for directions, only to have the person on duty tell you that it is more important to ask the question than to get where you want to go? Or if when you were in high school you were working on a science lab and the teacher asks if you have completed the assignment: “no, I thought it was more important for you to ask the question that for me to find the answer.” Zero!

If we are not careful to say that we have doubts, or to claim that doubt is a virtue, can be little more than a mushy and lazy faith. God gave us all brains and anticipates that we will use them. Those who have written, thoughtfully, about doubt often clarify what it is by what it isn’t.

Doubt is not chronic skepticism. I’m sure we have met people who have adopted skepticism as a lifestyle. They are skeptical about everything: “those charities say that 90% of the money gets to the people, but they’re all crooks. They say they landed men on the moon but I know they staged it on the back lot in Hollywood.” That skepticism can extend into faith as well, like a low-grade fever.

Doubt is not atheism. There are people who have a well developed rationale for not believing in God at all, but atheism is not the same as doubt. There are also atheists who are as fundamentalist about their beliefs, with no room for questions or doubt, as there are in certain “brands” of Christianity. It is possible to be a doubter and a person of strong Christian faith.

Doubt can be general and even an intellectual exercise, but more often doubt develops from the circumstances that are closest to the heart. We begin to question what we have learned and affirmed in general terms when you come against painful circumstances.

Years ago I mentioned a situation I encountered at a time in my ministry when our own children were young. Early one morning I got a distressed phone call from a family who had three young ones, as we did. Through the night their young son had cried out and the mother had responded. The little guy had a sore throat, so the mother comforted him and got him a drink of water. Eventually he drifted off to sleep. What she didn’t know and couldn’t know is that the soreness was the valve in his throat swelling shut, an incredibly rare occurrence. When she checked on him in the morning, she discovered, to her horror, that he had died in the night.

Of course I presided at the funeral for this child and at the beginning of the service I used the well-known words from John 11, “I am the resurrection and the life.” While I said those words, my heart wasn’t in them. No parent should go through what they were going through. This situation was not fair and God was not fair. Not only did I struggle that day, I did for several weeks afterward. I felt like a bit of a fraud when I preached on Sundays and I sure didn’t feel like talking with God. I suppose that I was putting my notion of a loving God and a loving Christ on trial in my own way.

In the end though I found my way back to life-giving faith, in part by doing. Just by being around other people of faith in Christ and singing the hymns and reading the stories I regained my spiritual balance. There is a passage at the beginning of the New Testament letter called James which I like:

If any of you is lacking in wisdom, ask God, who gives to all generously and ungrudgingly, and it will be given you. But ask in faith, never doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind; for the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to receive anything from the Lord.

James 1:5-8

I would like to think that when the writer says “never doubting” he is speaking of stubbornly staying in our doubt, because everyone doubts. But the image of doubt as a form of seasickness is wonderful, because seasickness in the loss of equilibrium and balance. We lose our balance and keep searching for the horizon to regain it. The encouragement for all of us is to actively seek wisdom and to find the balance in our Christian faith.

That may mean putting God and Christ on trial from time to time, if that means taking the evidence seriously and examining it carefully. It’s important that we use our heads and our hearts to deepen our faith. Gathering with others for worship and study is essential. While we may never be in total agreement, we can gain wisdom in community.

It can be our commitment and our joy to mature in faith, day by day. And faith always involves a willingness to step beyond the known and comfortable into that life-giving relationship with Christ which has been our promise through the ages. I hope we will also appreciate that there is always a leap of trust into faith.

Martin Luther King Jr. once offered that “faith is taking the first step, even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

The writer of the book of Hebrews in the New Testament puts it this way:“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for and the conviction of things not seen.”

In our passage today Jesus says: “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

We can all be people of reasonable doubt and living faith.