Where There Is Doubt, Faith

Sermon

If you have ever wondered to yourself, “How can all this God stuff possibly be true?” then you have experienced doubt. If you have ever said to yourself, “Jesus is my Savior,” then you have experienced faith. And if you have ever echoed the words of the man whose child Jesus healed, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief,” then you are a very normal person trying to figure out what role the Christian faith has in your life. You are okay.

Isn’t it interesting that a prayer for peace includes a line about doubt and faith? If you have ever experienced doubt, mild or overwhelming, you know that it can be really, really disruptive. It can shake up what you thought was the foundation of your being. It can call into question everything you were taught or maybe took for granted.

Seminary professors—and especially the Bible professors (as well as religion professors at colleges)—know to expect this from some of their first-year students. A person is brought up in the church, goes to Sunday School, listens to the sermons, attends Bible studies, and feels a call to ministry. So off to seminary they go. And then they hear their Hebrew Bible professor say that Moses did not write the first five books of the Bible.

And then they hear their New Testament professor say that much of what is in the gospels is not verbatim Jesus but the words of an editor who needed to shape things in a certain way. They are taught that the Bible is not inerrant, not without flaw, but is the result of oral traditions passed down over centuries, and then written down, and then edited, and then edited again, and then some manuscripts are lost or torn, and then translated, and… And some first-year seminarians say to themselves, “If the Bible is not 100% truly the inspired and inerrant word of God, how can I trust anything it says? How do I know what to believe?”

Perhaps at some point in your life of faith you had this sort of experience. You know how painful it can be. But maybe you’ve always had a sense that the Bible is literature as much as it is a faith document. For those of us who’ve thought that way, a different sort of doubt can creep in.

When Gregg and I first got to Westminster, I had been a pastor for 18 years. I had served nine congregations. That was after growing up in the church, taking a few religion classes in college, and going to seminary. I had seen spiritual directors off and on. I had a regular prayer life. I was solid.

And then I discovered Westminster in all its big-tent glory. Proud feminists claimed God as Father, which I found interesting. So many people came up to me and told me they could not possibly say the words of the Apostles’ Creed when we baptize someone, and couldn’t we take it out? (The answer to that is no.) And then some would tell me while they couldn’t say the Apostles’ Creed, somehow it worked for them to sing it. Loyal members told me they didn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus. People were worried that Gregg and I were maybe a little on the theologically conservative side, worried that we were dogmatic. There are more than a few here that would decline being nominated as an elder or deacon because they could not, in good conscience, answer the questions of ordination with a yes.

I’m not going to lie – all those experiences adding up were really hard for me. Before Westminster, no one had ever thought me to be theologically conservative or dogmatic. All these people who claimed their unbelief so affably shook me. I started to lose my faith. I started to wonder if I’d been worshipping and proclaiming some false god that didn’t really exist.

It was a very difficult season in my spiritual life.

It’s passed, with the help of some spiritual directors, and with prayer, and with the deepening of my relationships with all of you. As happens over time, we’ve come to trust each others’ stories and respect each other even if we don’t agree with each other.

Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief.

So if you’ve ever wondered if any or all of this God and Jesus stuff is true, if you’ve ever doubted the faith, that is a good thing. First of all, if you experience doubt, then that means there is something that you have believed that you are now questioning.

The late Dr. James Fowler was Professor of Theology and Human Development at Emory University and was a minister in the United Methodist Church. He wrote a seminal work on the stages of faith, and some of them might resonate with some of you.

His fourth stage of faith is the “Individuative-Reflective” faith (ages mid-twenties to late thirties). In this stage, the young adult experiences some chafing as they begin to take personal responsibility for their beliefs, which become a little more complex and nuanced. The believer becomes more open minded but then can experience conflict as new beliefs contradict old ones. Doubts may rise.

His fifth stage of faith is the “Conjunctive” faith (mid-life crisis). This person, maybe in their 40s or 50s, can understand the paradoxes that exist within faith. They might let go of previously held beliefs. They understand that no one statement of faith can get to the whole truth of the spiritual mystery that is faith.

Fowler’s sixth and last stage of faith is “Universalizing” faith (or “Enlightenment”). This stage is rarely achieved and usually only by older adults. They are “not hemmed in by differences in religious or spiritual beliefs among people in the world, but regard all beings as worthy of compassion and deep understanding.” (https://www.institute4learning.com/2020/06/12/the-stages-of-faith-according-to-james-w-fowler/)

All of which is to say that maybe the doubts we experience in our spiritual lives, on our faith journeys, are the result not of our weak will or our unworthiness but a result of our taking our faith seriously enough to question it as we move farther along the path.

For Jesus and his contemporaries, faith was not so much an assent to a list of things you had to believe in as much as it was a sort of loyalty. When Jesus spoke about having faith, the kind of faith that could kill a fig tree or move a mountain, he was talking about loyalty to God, fidelity to God. And how do we show our loyalty? By siding with God, by living in the way God asks us to live.
This story about Jesus cursing the fig tree takes place during the last week of Jesus’ life. The previous day Jesus had gone to the temple in Jerusalem and became infuriated at the mockery the sellers and priest were making of that holy place. Jesus is not his usual, calm self. He is worked up—he knows his time is growing very short, and we might say he simply does not have time for such foolishness as making the holy temple a souvenir shop or being a fig tree that does not produce figs.

Perhaps what is also driving him is his uncertainty about his disciples’ faith, about their loyalty to him and their willingness to follow his teachings. Time after time they have not understood their teacher or have twisted his lessons out of ignorance or a desire for power or prestige. In another gospel, Jesus tells his disciples that they only need as much faith as would fit in a mustard seed—even with that teensy amount of loyalty to him and to their God, they would be able to do amazing things.

Why does he worry about this? Because he is about to pass the mantle to them; soon they will have to pick up their own crosses as they follow him. Soon their loyalty to him will be tested by those in power with evil intent. Will they persevere? Or will the last three years have been for nought?

However strong or wavering the disciples’ faith, it was enough, because here we are today. For millennia people have been loyal to God and Jesus, and still we have our doubts, and still we have faith.

In light of this rather one-way conversation about faith (thank you for listening), it’s interesting to consider what the apostle Paul said about faith in those dog-eared words from his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13. The last verse throws a wrench in this faith conversation. Using the King James translation, Paul writes, “Now faith, hope, and charity abide, these three; and the greatest of these is charity.”

I have known people of extraordinary faith and loyalty to God who’ve been as mean as a cur. And I have known atheists who show extraordinary charity to the least among us. Our loyalty to God and to the way of Jesus might put us on the team, but if we’re doing any of this without charity, without love, we might as well be running a marathon all by ourselves.

The late philosopher Martin Buber tells this story. A rabbi was asked by one of his students “Why did God create atheists?”

After a long pause, the rabbi finally responded with a soft but sincere voice. “God created atheists,” he said, “to teach us the most important lesson of them all—the lesson of true compassion. You see, when an atheist performs an act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that God commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his actions are based on his sense of morality. Look at the kindness he bestows on others simply because he feels it to be right.”

(And Buber continues.) “When someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say, ‘I’ll pray that God will help you.’ Instead, for that moment, you should become an atheist – imagine there is no God who could help, and say, ‘I will help you.’” (Tales of Hasidim)

So may we live out our faith and live with fidelity to our God, claiming our doubts as we do.