SERMON SPOTLIGHT: 2A Easter, April 12, 2026
The Rev. Aron Kramer
2 Easter
April 12, 2026
I used to do a fair amount of premarital counseling, and there is always a moment early in those conversations I quietly looked forward to. We would get to talking about love, what it is, what it will ask of them, and I would tell couples something that almost never landed the way I intend it.
I tell them that love is not a destination you arrive at and then simply maintain. It is not something you frame and hang on the wall. Love is alive. It grows and fades, brightens and dims, breaks open places in us we never asked to have broken open. It will cause them, at some point, to question each other in ways they cannot yet imagine.
That's usually when I would get the looks.
Because early on, of course, nothing could possibly cause them to question their love for this person they are about to marry. And I smile, one of the few moments I allowed myself a quiet I know something you don't yet kind of feeling. Because it's true, isn't it? Love was never meant to be kept clean and sanitary on a pedestal somewhere. Love is meant to be shared, tested, dropped, banged up, cherished, and lived. It is meant to be given to people we know well and people we do not know at all.
Most of us have loved someone, the kind of love that asked something of you, that changed you, that broke something open you didn't know needed breaking. However that love has looked in your life, however it has changed or shifted or surprised you, hold that for just a moment.
Because love never stays the same, does it?
I think about faith the same way.
As many of you have heard over the years, a professor in seminary once told us, the opposite of faith is not doubt, the opposite of faith is fear. Fear is what locks the doors. Fear is what keeps us frozen in place, hiding from the very people and experiences that could transform us. Doubt, on the other hand, is faith doing its honest work. Doubt is love asking harder questions. Doubt is what keeps us from settling for a God that is too small, too safe, too neatly framed above the door.
Last week I got to hang with Fritz, it was a blast, until it wasn't. As we walked back to the car, his entire agenda became clear. He walked next to me and said, "You know, Aron, my Dad's favorite Gospel was this Gospel we will hear on Sunday. He was an engineer, a scientist of sorts, and always had questions. He loved this Gospel." Fritz then stopped at the car and looked at me hard and said, "Don't mess it up."
I'm joking, he didn't really say that, but he did tell me that this Gospel is a favorite of his. And yes, I highly recommend hanging out with Fritz. I was not paid to share this information with you.
I wonder if we have not been entirely fair to Thomas over the centuries. We call him Doubting Thomas as though doubt is some kind of character flaw, a spiritual deficiency, something to be embarrassed about. But look at what Thomas actually does in this story. He doesn't walk away. He doesn't decide the whole thing is too much and go back to fishing. He stays, he keeps showing up with the other disciples, even in his uncertainty. When Jesus finally appears, Thomas doesn't hedge, he makes the most sweeping confession of faith in the entire Gospel: My Lord and my God.
Thomas was not faithless. Thomas was afraid to hope. There is a difference.
And I wonder if Thomas speaks for more of us than we'd like to admit. Not just in his doubt about the resurrection, but in his doubt about himself. Whether he had what it took. Whether he was the right person to be carrying this story forward. That kind of doubt, the doubt about our own gifts, our own ability to love well, to follow well, to show up as the people God is calling us to be, that doubt is in this room too. The doubt that whispers: I am not sure I am enough for this. I am not sure my faith is strong enough, or my love generous enough, or my life faithful enough.
This past week, Erin and I watched an episode of Band of Brothers, and there was a fascinating moment when Sergeant Speirs talks to Private Albert Blithe about his fear of being in France and fighting the Nazis. He tells Pvt. Blithe that his fear stems from holding onto hope. Speirs states: "The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead. And the sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a soldier's supposed to function. Without mercy, without compassion, without remorse. All war depends on it."
I am not trying to glorify war in any way here, but what Speirs gets right, even if for the wrong reasons, is that we can only function, as soldiers, as followers of Jesus, as human beings, when we let go of what we are holding onto for dear life. Not hope. Never hope. But the certainty that we have it all figured out. The need to be right about God before we'll let God be real. The version of Jesus we've already decided on, that the real Jesus keeps failing to be. Thomas had to put all of that down and just reach.
Because Jesus comes to Thomas in a body. A real one. Wounded, recognizable, physical. Jesus says to Thomas, "Put your finger here. See my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side." The risen Christ does not appear to his followers as a vision or a theological concept. He shows up in the homeliness and everydayness of a locked room, with wounds still visible, with breath that can be felt.
A Lutheran pastor I read once wrote, the resurrection can become a pleasant abstraction — bells and lilies and joyous music at a careful distance from the broken body. But the risen Christ refused that distance. He came among them in shared walks and shared meals, in wounds that could be touched. What if we stopped keeping the resurrection safely framed and at a distance? What if we stopped hedging against hope and just entered the moment the way Thomas did, recognizing that Jesus is here, right now, in this place?
We live in a time that worships information. We trust what we can verify, quantify, and display on a screen. And yet, here is Thomas, invited not to analyze the resurrection but to touch it. To let his body be the way he encounters the resurrected Jesus. There is something important in that Gospel invitation. We are not just minds looking for data, we are bodies, breathing, feeling, reaching. And sometimes what we most need is not more certainty but more contact — contact with the living, the grieving, the bread broken at a table, the hand placed on a shoulder in a hospital room. This is where resurrection tends to show up. Not in propositions, but in presence.
Bill Countryman, my former Seminary professor, writes, "God is the object of faith, not knowledge. God is glimpsed, hinted at, gestured toward."
And Paul Tillich pushes even further: we do not comprehend God — we are comprehended by God. We do not grasp; we are grasped. Whatever certainty we have is not the certainty of solved equations. It is the certainty of being held.
That is a very different kind of knowing. Countryman also says that no one says yes or no to God in a single definitive moment. It happens over time. Our lives, fully lived, gloriously imperfect, are our answers. We are always only beginning to say yes, always only beginning to say no. And in that long, slow, meandering response, God is with us. Walking with us. Eating with us. Carrying us when we cannot carry ourselves.
Whenever we are afraid and hiding, locked in whatever room we have built for ourselves, God comes and says: Peace be with you. God doesn't come and say: get it together. Not: figure this out. Not: stop doubting. Just: peace. Whatever doubts churn in our minds, whatever sins trouble our consciences, whatever questions we have about our own adequacy, whatever walls we have constructed or doors we have bolted shut, God's first move is always toward us, and it is always love.
The Rev. Stephen Stanley, a wise man I knew a long time ago, once sent me an email I have referenced many times, and will sound familiar to you all. It said: Aron, if you are confused, thank God. If you do not have all the answers, thank God. If you do not know exactly what God is up to, thank God. If you have to wait upon the Lord, thank God.
The opposite of faith is not doubt. It is fear. And as Jesus breathed peace upon his disciples in that locked room, may that same breath find us, in our uncertainty, in our unfinished yeses and nos, in our doubt about ourselves and our gifts and our ability to follow Jesus, and may it loosen whatever fear has kept us from the living, wounded, risen Christ who keeps showing up anyway.
2 Easter
April 12, 2026
I used to do a fair amount of premarital counseling, and there is always a moment early in those conversations I quietly looked forward to. We would get to talking about love, what it is, what it will ask of them, and I would tell couples something that almost never landed the way I intend it.
I tell them that love is not a destination you arrive at and then simply maintain. It is not something you frame and hang on the wall. Love is alive. It grows and fades, brightens and dims, breaks open places in us we never asked to have broken open. It will cause them, at some point, to question each other in ways they cannot yet imagine.
That's usually when I would get the looks.
Because early on, of course, nothing could possibly cause them to question their love for this person they are about to marry. And I smile, one of the few moments I allowed myself a quiet I know something you don't yet kind of feeling. Because it's true, isn't it? Love was never meant to be kept clean and sanitary on a pedestal somewhere. Love is meant to be shared, tested, dropped, banged up, cherished, and lived. It is meant to be given to people we know well and people we do not know at all.
Most of us have loved someone, the kind of love that asked something of you, that changed you, that broke something open you didn't know needed breaking. However that love has looked in your life, however it has changed or shifted or surprised you, hold that for just a moment.
Because love never stays the same, does it?
I think about faith the same way.
As many of you have heard over the years, a professor in seminary once told us, the opposite of faith is not doubt, the opposite of faith is fear. Fear is what locks the doors. Fear is what keeps us frozen in place, hiding from the very people and experiences that could transform us. Doubt, on the other hand, is faith doing its honest work. Doubt is love asking harder questions. Doubt is what keeps us from settling for a God that is too small, too safe, too neatly framed above the door.
Last week I got to hang with Fritz, it was a blast, until it wasn't. As we walked back to the car, his entire agenda became clear. He walked next to me and said, "You know, Aron, my Dad's favorite Gospel was this Gospel we will hear on Sunday. He was an engineer, a scientist of sorts, and always had questions. He loved this Gospel." Fritz then stopped at the car and looked at me hard and said, "Don't mess it up."
I'm joking, he didn't really say that, but he did tell me that this Gospel is a favorite of his. And yes, I highly recommend hanging out with Fritz. I was not paid to share this information with you.
I wonder if we have not been entirely fair to Thomas over the centuries. We call him Doubting Thomas as though doubt is some kind of character flaw, a spiritual deficiency, something to be embarrassed about. But look at what Thomas actually does in this story. He doesn't walk away. He doesn't decide the whole thing is too much and go back to fishing. He stays, he keeps showing up with the other disciples, even in his uncertainty. When Jesus finally appears, Thomas doesn't hedge, he makes the most sweeping confession of faith in the entire Gospel: My Lord and my God.
Thomas was not faithless. Thomas was afraid to hope. There is a difference.
And I wonder if Thomas speaks for more of us than we'd like to admit. Not just in his doubt about the resurrection, but in his doubt about himself. Whether he had what it took. Whether he was the right person to be carrying this story forward. That kind of doubt, the doubt about our own gifts, our own ability to love well, to follow well, to show up as the people God is calling us to be, that doubt is in this room too. The doubt that whispers: I am not sure I am enough for this. I am not sure my faith is strong enough, or my love generous enough, or my life faithful enough.
This past week, Erin and I watched an episode of Band of Brothers, and there was a fascinating moment when Sergeant Speirs talks to Private Albert Blithe about his fear of being in France and fighting the Nazis. He tells Pvt. Blithe that his fear stems from holding onto hope. Speirs states: "The only hope you have is to accept the fact that you're already dead. And the sooner you accept that, the sooner you'll be able to function as a soldier's supposed to function. Without mercy, without compassion, without remorse. All war depends on it."
I am not trying to glorify war in any way here, but what Speirs gets right, even if for the wrong reasons, is that we can only function, as soldiers, as followers of Jesus, as human beings, when we let go of what we are holding onto for dear life. Not hope. Never hope. But the certainty that we have it all figured out. The need to be right about God before we'll let God be real. The version of Jesus we've already decided on, that the real Jesus keeps failing to be. Thomas had to put all of that down and just reach.
Because Jesus comes to Thomas in a body. A real one. Wounded, recognizable, physical. Jesus says to Thomas, "Put your finger here. See my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side." The risen Christ does not appear to his followers as a vision or a theological concept. He shows up in the homeliness and everydayness of a locked room, with wounds still visible, with breath that can be felt.
A Lutheran pastor I read once wrote, the resurrection can become a pleasant abstraction — bells and lilies and joyous music at a careful distance from the broken body. But the risen Christ refused that distance. He came among them in shared walks and shared meals, in wounds that could be touched. What if we stopped keeping the resurrection safely framed and at a distance? What if we stopped hedging against hope and just entered the moment the way Thomas did, recognizing that Jesus is here, right now, in this place?
We live in a time that worships information. We trust what we can verify, quantify, and display on a screen. And yet, here is Thomas, invited not to analyze the resurrection but to touch it. To let his body be the way he encounters the resurrected Jesus. There is something important in that Gospel invitation. We are not just minds looking for data, we are bodies, breathing, feeling, reaching. And sometimes what we most need is not more certainty but more contact — contact with the living, the grieving, the bread broken at a table, the hand placed on a shoulder in a hospital room. This is where resurrection tends to show up. Not in propositions, but in presence.
Bill Countryman, my former Seminary professor, writes, "God is the object of faith, not knowledge. God is glimpsed, hinted at, gestured toward."
And Paul Tillich pushes even further: we do not comprehend God — we are comprehended by God. We do not grasp; we are grasped. Whatever certainty we have is not the certainty of solved equations. It is the certainty of being held.
That is a very different kind of knowing. Countryman also says that no one says yes or no to God in a single definitive moment. It happens over time. Our lives, fully lived, gloriously imperfect, are our answers. We are always only beginning to say yes, always only beginning to say no. And in that long, slow, meandering response, God is with us. Walking with us. Eating with us. Carrying us when we cannot carry ourselves.
Whenever we are afraid and hiding, locked in whatever room we have built for ourselves, God comes and says: Peace be with you. God doesn't come and say: get it together. Not: figure this out. Not: stop doubting. Just: peace. Whatever doubts churn in our minds, whatever sins trouble our consciences, whatever questions we have about our own adequacy, whatever walls we have constructed or doors we have bolted shut, God's first move is always toward us, and it is always love.
The Rev. Stephen Stanley, a wise man I knew a long time ago, once sent me an email I have referenced many times, and will sound familiar to you all. It said: Aron, if you are confused, thank God. If you do not have all the answers, thank God. If you do not know exactly what God is up to, thank God. If you have to wait upon the Lord, thank God.
The opposite of faith is not doubt. It is fear. And as Jesus breathed peace upon his disciples in that locked room, may that same breath find us, in our uncertainty, in our unfinished yeses and nos, in our doubt about ourselves and our gifts and our ability to follow Jesus, and may it loosen whatever fear has kept us from the living, wounded, risen Christ who keeps showing up anyway.
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