4/28/19 “Doubt: Faith’s Partner” by Nancy Petty
Text: John 20:19-31
I was not ready for the young man’s line of questioning. Not because his questions were unfamiliar – I had heard different variations of them throughout my entire ministry. It was more about the intersection of his story and the questions he was asking and my own faith journey that caught me off guard. He had just been rejected by his family and abandoned by his closest friends (church friends) because he was finally choosing to live his most authentic life. He was feeling lost, alone, and he was grieving. The faith he had built his life on – the faith he had been taught in his Southern Baptist church – only complicated the questions he brought to our conversation. He was struggling to reconcile his learned faith with his desire to live fully into whom he knew God had created him to be. Everything he had been taught about God and Jesus, sin and judgment wasn’t resonating with his own experience and his emerging understanding of faith. He felt that the proverbial rug was being pulled out from under his feet. How could he have built his faith on a foundation that now felt like it was crumbling underneath him?
He asked me, “How, Nancy, do you keep your faith? How do you know that God loves you as you are? Do you really think that God is present in you and in the world? With all the suffering in the world, do you really think God is real and that God cares?” I wish I could tell you that I simply sat with this young man in his questioning and offered him the reassurance that he was asking the right questions– “right” meaning authentic questions. I wish I could tell you that I didn’t try and give him answers. But I can’t. The truth is I fumbled the ball. One the one-yard line of pastoral ministry – the one-yard line being that crucial pastoral moment of being a witness instead of a trying to have an answer to everything – I fumbled the ball. I talked too much. I gave too many answers – answers that meant very little to this young man. I tried to reassure him with old adages like: “Faith is about trusting what we can’t see.” “God is present even when we can’t feel God’s presence.” “Love always wins.” “Your parents will change, just give them time.” Blah. Blah. Blah. On this particular day, with this young man, I couldn’t just admit that I have the same questions and doubts about faith. For misguided reasons, I thought I needed to play the role of wise pastor and give him some answers – and I could spin this and say I thought I needed to give him hope – but the honest truth is that his questions came too close to my own doubts of faith and I felt, in that moment, inadequate as a pastor.
I can’t explain it but I have these moments, usually when I am alone driving in my car, that these strong feelings of doubt about God and faith and what the real meaning of life is will wash over me leaving me with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. My mind starts thinking, “What if we’ve made it all up – that there is a God and that faith matters.” “What if I’m wrong about what sin is and what it’s not?” “What if God doesn’t love me just as I am?” What if I have it all wrong – “it” being all the things I think to be true about God and Jesus and faith?” What if it is true that everything happens for a reason?” “What if the sins of parents are visited upon our children?” What if Joel Osteen and Jerry Farwell know something I don’t know?” “What if this life is all there is and when it’s over, it’s over?” “If God cared, why is there so much suffering?”
In September of 2014, in a personal interview in front of hundreds of people in Bristol Cathedral, the Most Rev. Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, said: “There are moments, sure, where you think ‘Is there a God? Where is God?’” He quickly added that, as the leader of the world’s 80 million-strong Anglican community, this was “probably not what the Archbishop of Canterbury should say.” The next day, The International Business Times called it “the doubt of the century.” Another journalist wrote excitedly, “Atheism is on the rise and it appears as though even those at the top of the church are beginning to have doubts.”
The interviewer, BBC Bristol’s Lucy Tegg, reminded the archbishop of the weight his words carried. She said, “You have a remarkably prominent role within the faith community around the world.” Then she asked: “Do you ever doubt?” Archbishop Welby replied: “Yes, I do. In lots of different ways really. It’s a very good question. That means I’ve got to think about what I’m going to say. Yes, I do.” He added: “I love the Psalms, if you look at Psalm 88, that’s full of doubt.” He went on to say that his doubts were a regular occurrence, by recounting a morning run with his dog. He said: “The other day I was praying as I was running and I ended up saying to God: ‘Look, this is all very well but isn’t it about time you did something – if you’re there…which is probably not what the Archbishop of Canterbury should say.”
Doubt has been faith’s partner as long as religion has been around. Julia Baird of The New York Times in an article title, Doubt as a Sign of Faith writes:
As Christopher Lane argued in “The Age of Doubt,” the explosion of questioning among Christian thinkers in the Victorian era transformed the idea of doubt from a sin or lapse to necessary exploration. Many influential Christian writers, like Calvin and C.S. Lewis, have acknowledged times of uncertainty. The Southern writer Flannery O’Connor said there was “no suffering greater than what is caused by the doubts of those who want to believe,” but for her, these torments were “the process by which faith is deepened.” Mother Teresa, too, startled the world when her posthumous diaries revealed that she was tormented by a continual gloom and aching to see, or sense, God. In 1953 she wrote, “Please pray especially for me that I may not spoil His work and that Our Lord may show Himself — for there is such terrible darkness within me as if everything was dead. It has been like this more or less from the time I started ‘the work.”’ And yet by this work, she helped many thousands of people. And it’s not always torment. Some live quite contentedly with a patchwork of doubt. Who can possibly hope to understand everything, and to have exhaustively researched all areas of uncertainty? How can we jam the infinite and contain it in our tiny brains? This is why there is so much comfort in mystery. Just over a month before he died, Benjamin Franklin wrote that he thought the “System of morals” and the religion of Jesus of Nazareth were the “best the World ever saw,” though Franklin said he had, along “with most of the present Dissenters in England, some Doubts as to his Divinity: tho’ it is a Question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble.” A logical pragmatism.”
If the Victorian era ushered in the “age of doubt,” the Modern era has handed us just the opposite. We now live in the “age of certainty.” Years of study are no longer needed. A Facebook page or a Google search will give you all the answers you need to life’s questions and problems. “No need to waste 10 years on a degree. WebMD.com will do in the Age of Certainty, where the pursuit of knowledge has been replaced by just knowing it all.” But the big kahuna of the Age of Certainty is none other than the prosperity gospel preached in large cathedrals, small storefront churches, and mainline protestant churches of all denominations and sizes. The prosperity gospel is certain in its certainty that it certainly has all the answers to how one achieves a successful life. Prosperity preachers such as Joel Osteen, Oral Roberts, Jim Bakker, Tammy Faye Bakker, Kenneth Copeland, Joyce Meyer, and Paula White are all eager to give you, with great certainty, the formula to a life blessed by God: financially, physically, and spiritually. All you need in this age of certainty is an unquestioned faith, along with the power of positive thinking, and the willingness to send your money to religious causes that will guarantee your financial wealth.
Kate Bowler, assistant professor at Duke Divinity School, who has studied extensively the prosperity gospel writes:
The prosperity gospel is a theodicy, an explanation for the problem of evil. It is an answer to the questions that take our lives apart: Why do some people get healed and some people don’t? Why do some people leap and land on their feet while others tumble all the way down? Why do some babies die in their cribs and some bitter souls live to see their great-grandchildren? The prosperity gospel looks at the world as it is and promises a solution. It guarantees that faith will always make a way…the prosperity gospel asks you to set aside your doubts and bet it all on God’s supernatural power to reach down and remake the world according to your prayer. When everything in your body says believe, believe, believe.
For years now, I have felt a connection to the disciple dubbed doubting Thomas. While he has been chastised by preachers for doubting, for needing some proof to the living Christ, I feel a kinship with Thomas every time that feeling of doubt washes over me when I am alone driving with my thoughts. I understand his need to see to believe. How many times in my own doubt have I prayed to God: “Give me a sign, God. Just one sign that you are real, that you care, that you are present in this world. Give me a sign, God, that you love me as I am, that my daughter will be okay, that what I do in this life matters.” And then comes my next prayer: God, help me recognize the sign when it is given.
Telling you this I feel a little like Archbishop Welby. This is probably not something you want to hear from your pastor. But the truth is that I come to you each Sunday not with certainty but with sincere doubts partnered with a questioning and sincere faith. My faith is deepened when I allow the doubts to clarify my thinking. For it is in my doubts that I can see the possibility of how love and compassion can heal a broken world, and in that doubt and possibility, my faith is strengthened. “While certainty frequently calcifies into rigidity, intolerance, and self-righteousness, doubt can deepen, clarify and explain…Faith cannot block out darkness or doubt. When on the cross, Jesus did not cry out ‘Here I come!’ but ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ His disciples brimmed with doubts and misgivings. Just as courage is persisting in the face of fear, so faith is persisting in the presence of doubt. Faith becomes then a commitment, a practice and a pact that is usually sustained by belief. But doubt is not just a roiling or a vulnerability; it can also be a strength. Doubt acknowledges our own limitations and confirms — or challenges — fundamental beliefs, and is not a detractor of belief but a crucial part of it.”
The next time you have doubts about God and faith and the meaning of life, I encourage you to welcome Thomas to sit with you and to hold your hand. The next time the world’s suffering gets too much to bear and you need a sign from God that God is real and that God cares, welcome Thomas to sit with you and hold your hand. For it is the disciple Thomas who understands that sometimes we need to see in order to believe. And that sometimes our doubts help deepen and clarify and explain our faith.
Kate Bowler, assistant professor at Duke Divinity School, whom I quoted earlier is in her mid-30’s. She is a wife and a mother of a 2-year-old. And she is living with stage 4 colon cancer. In her book, Everything Happens For A Reason she reflects on those first few days after her diagnosis. She writes:
At a time when I should have felt abandoned by God, I was not reduced to ashes. I felt like I was floating, floating on the love and prayers of all those who hummed around me like worker bees, bringing notes and flowers and warm socks and quilts embroidered with words of encouragement. They came in like priests and mirrored back to me the face of Jesus.
When they sat beside me, my hand in their hands, my own suffering began to feel like it had revealed to me the suffering of others, a world of those who, like me, are stumbling in the debris of dreams they thought they were entitled to and plans they didn’t realize they had made.
That feeling stayed with me for months. In fact, I had grown so accustomed to that floating feeling that I started to panic at the prospect of losing it. So I began to ask friends, theologians, historians, pastors I knew, and nun I like, What am I going to do when it’s gone? And they knew exactly what I meant because they had either felt it themselves or read about it in the great works of Christian theology. St. Augustine called it “the sweetness.” Thomas Aquinas called it something mystical like “the prophetic light.” But all said yes, it will go. The feelings will go. The sense of God’s presence will go. There will be no lasting proof that God exists. There will be no formula for how to get it back.
But they offered me this small bit of certainty, and I clung to it. When the feelings recede like the tides, they said, they will leave an imprint. I would somehow be marked by the presence of an unbidden God.
In our doubts, in our uncertainty, we are marked by the presence of an unbidden God. And to that, we say: Blessed are our Thomas moments! Blessed are our sacred and holy doubts!
