“Beyond all these things put on love, which is the perfect bond of unity.” Colossians 3:14 (NRSV)
Here is the Worship Link for Sunday, April 5, 2026: https://youtu.be/yasXon5s-Ec
Scripture to Ponder – April 6, 2026
Second Week After Easter
Texts: Acts 2:14a, 22–32; Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:3–9; John 20:19–31
On the evening of that first Easter day, the disciples were gathered behind locked doors—held not only by fear, but by the collapse of meaning. The crucifixion had undone their expectations of God. What they thought they knew of power, salvation, and hope had been shattered. And so they gathered, not as a triumphant community of faith, but as a fragile community of uncertainty.
And it is precisely there—within that theological disorientation—that the risen Christ appears. Not outside their fear, but within it. Not after their faith has been restored, but while it is still trembling. “Peace be with you,” he says—not as a greeting alone, but as a re-creation of their very being.
A week later, the doors are still closed. Resurrection has not erased their anxiety. The wounds of Good Friday still echo in their lives. And Thomas—often reduced to a symbol of doubt—enters the scene. But perhaps Thomas is not the problem. Perhaps Thomas is the truth-teller. He refuses a secondhand faith. He resists inherited certainty. He longs for an encounter that is real, embodied, and honest.
And again, Christ comes. Not to correct Thomas, but to meet him. Not to condemn questioning, but to inhabit it. “Put your finger here… Do not doubt but believe.”
This is not a command to suppress doubt, but an invitation to move through it—toward relationship. The Greek movement here is not from doubt to blind certainty, but from isolation to encounter, from abstraction to embodied knowing.
And it is within the gathered community—still imperfect, still uncertain—that Thomas makes his confession:
“My Lord and my God.”
This raises a deeper question for us today:
Is our faith becoming thinner—reduced to habit, to memory, to inherited language that no longer carries weight?
Or is there another way—a way not of returning to certainty, but of rediscovering depth?
John’s Gospel suggests that faith does not deepen by avoiding doubt, but by engaging it within community. The absence of Thomas is not condemned, but his presence becomes transformative. For it is in presence—within the shared life of discipleship—that Christ is encountered anew.
Perhaps the thinning of faith in our time is not because people question too much, but because we have lost spaces where questioning can be held, honored, and accompanied. When faith is reduced to answers alone, it becomes fragile. But when faith is lived as relationship—as participation in the living Christ—it becomes resilient.
Resurrection, then, is not simply an event to be believed. It is a reality to be entered. It is the ongoing work of God breaking into locked rooms—into fear, into doubt, into communities that are still trying to make sense of it all.
There are still many locked doors among us. Doors shaped by grief, by injustice, by disillusionment with institutions, even by silence in the face of suffering. And we might wonder: where is Christ in all of this?
The Gospel answers—not by removing the doors, but by revealing a presence that is not contained by them. Christ comes through them. Christ stands among us. Christ breathes peace into spaces where faith feels thin.
And perhaps the renewal of faith does not begin with stronger belief, but with deeper presence.
Presence with one another.
Presence with our questions.
Presence within a community that dares to gather even when certainty is absent.
For it is there—again and again—that Christ meets us.
And over time, not through force but through encounter, something begins to take shape within us. Not borrowed words, not inherited phrases, but a confession that emerges from lived experience:
“My Lord and my God.”
Let us pray.
Risen Christ,
you come to us in the midst of fear,
through the doors we have closed,
and into the places we try to hide.
Speak your peace into our restless hearts.
Meet us in our questions and our doubts,
and draw us gently back into community—
where we can see, and hear, and believe together.
Hold us in your grace
when faith feels fragile,
and lead us, step by step,
toward trust, toward hope,
and toward that deep confession of love:
My Lord and my God. Amen.
Trinity United Church 