Doubt, faith and real life...

NOTE: As is my custom, these are this Sunday's sermon notes which I share because... that's what I do. If you are in Pittsfield, MA at 10:30 am this week, stop by. It would be fun to see you.

“Doubt is the beginning – not the end – of wisdom” an old sage once told me. The French philosopher, Voltaire, believed that, “while doubt is uncomfortable, certainty is ridiculous.” Paul Tillich trusted that “Doubt is not the opposite of faith, but rather one important element of it.” And Vaclav Havel, poet, playwright and the first president of a free Czech Republic, has found that often, “It is the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties: Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps no one ever finds sense in life without first experiencing absurdity?”

Why, then, do so many Christians – progressive and fundamentalist alike – think that doubt is destructive – the antithesis of faith – and something to be battled rather than embraced? Let’s face it: some of the greatest heroes of the Bible have been filled with doubt – and it served them well.

+ We start with Abraham and Sarah who had no idea where God was leading them when they left the security of their tradition for the blessings of the Promised Land – who had no reason to trust that God would bring the fruit of a new child to Sarah’s ancient womb – who, in fact, laughed at God’s promise and doubted God’s word, but who came to represent the very essence of our faith tradition – the mother and father of a new people – born of doubt and trust and God’s amazing presence.

+ We move to Moses – slow of speech and uncertain of his abilities – who kept pleading with God for clarity over and over again and came to experience the Lord’s presence as a pillar of cloud by day and a fire by night.

+ Think of the Psalmist weeping, “How long, O Lord, how long must we sing our song in exile and emptiness?” Or Job – or the prophet Jeremiah in his despair?

Even Jesus on the Cross crying out, “My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?” Peter was often filled with doubt, Paul certainly had times when he was totally in the dark, Mary and Martha challenged the Lord with their doubts after the death of their brother Lazarus and on and on it goes. Doubt, raising questions and refusing to swallow the simple minded solutions of priests, ministers and other peddlers of orthodoxy is at the heart of our Judeo-Christian tradition.

And yet so very often and in so many tragic ways our doubts and questions are either trivialized – so that we feel stupid and unworthy – or turned back against us to keep us in our place so that more and more people are coming to the conclusion that while they may be spiritual, they certainly aren’t religious. Because religion has given doubt a bad name.

Philip Yancey, the very thoughtful and tender evangelical author of books such as Where Is God When It Hurts?, What’s So Amazing About Grace and Does Prayer Make Any Difference?, tells the story of one of his friends who was hospitalized with cancer that seemed to come out of nowhere. Her husband was traumatized as she went under the knife for emergency surgery and then perplexed and angry as she failed to respond to the chemo and radiation treatments. (Please note: this is my less than poetic paraphrase because I can't find his book; please forgive any excess because Yancey's words are much better than mine.)

But what made this dreadful experience even worse were the people from their church – good and loving people – who said some of the most stupid and hurtful things all in the name of being helpful. One woman came to visit and after a short time told the couple to keep praying – and being faithful – because God hears all the prayers of those whose faith is strong. Talk about adding insult to injury, yes? And when the woman with the cancer asked, “What does it mean if my tumor isn’t healed?” she was told – no joke – “well, then clearly your faith was not strong enough.”

Another woman visited – one prone to New Age thinking – chatted and carried on like there was nothing wrong with her friend. After about 30 minutes of this fluff, however, her husband said, “Why are you babbling on and on about stuff that doesn’t matter when Ellen is facing death?” only to be told: “Stop being so negative – that’s where the cancer comes from – negativity. Just be positive and she will all be alright!”

But the final blow came when their pastor visited. Like many of us, his heart was in the right place, he truly loved his flock and he believed in God’s love and power. So as they were talking after a treatment and Ellen’s husband asked how he could make sense out of his grief and fear – if not his anger with God – the pastor said: “Jeff, look, we don’t always understand the ways of the Lord. The prophet Isaiah tells us that ‘my ways aren’t your ways saith the Lord’ and I trust that.”

That isn’t so bad – not really helpful – but at least it is something that makes some sense: there is a mysterious aspect to God that we can’t always grasp because… we aren’t God. Lots of people say that and while it doesn’t do anything to help a person with their doubts and fears, usually it doesn’t do any harm (which is always a good rule, yes?) But that damned minister went on to say – and I am certain that he should be damned for this – that “the scripture also tells us in Deuteronomy 28 that “if you will only obey the Lord your God by diligently observing all his commandments… blessings shall come upon you and overtake you… but if you will not obey the Lord your God… then curses shall come and overtake you.’ So tell me, Jeff, could it be that there is some sin you haven’t confessed or repented of – or maybe Ellen – that is at the core of this cancer?”

I’m with Jeremiah Wright on this one: God damn him – God damn him to hell! What an ugly and misguided – dare I say destructive – misinterpretation of Scripture – all in the context of a pastoral visit! But, you see, that’s what you get from a religious tradition that is afraid and unfamiliar with doubt and ambiguity.

And I am sad to say, that’s what has happened to a lot of American Christianity over the years as we have uncritically embraced the theology of a 16th century genius, John Calvin, without discerning what rings true for 21st century living. Let me give you the genesis of what has become the simplistic understanding of a Reformed Theology of suffering because I have come to believe that this is where our problems with doubt originate.

Now you have to recall that for Brother Calvin, who began his work as a French Roman Catholic studying to be a lawyer but who later experienced a spiritual conversion that led him into the emerging Protestant Church, the world was not a safe place. Protestants were considered heretics in France and Calvin had to go into hiding in fear for his life. Eventually he had to flee his homeland for Germany and finally Geneva, Switzerland.

These were tumultuous times – the Spanish Inquisition was moving into high gear – and to make matters worse, Calvin came to experience great physical pain – migraines, lung hemorrhages, gout and kidney stones. So, in the midst of pain and chaos – political and theological controversy – Calvin came to write a theology of suffering and God’s place in it that eliminated doubt as well as ambiguity. In a word, he needed to both understand and believe that God was in control of all things – good and bad, heaven and earth – for this would help him face the challenges of every day. And the heart of what Calvin conceptualized can be summarized like this:

+ When there is pain and trouble in our lives, sometimes it is the result of sin that needs to be confessed and faced honestly.

+ Sometimes God brings pain and suffering into our lives so that others might see how to bear it with grace and dignity – that is, sometimes we are a living Bible for another with less faith.

+ Sometimes our anguish is to test and deepen our faith – like the story of Job. And when it is none of these, Calvin noted, then we must claim the mystery of the Lord whose ways are not our ways and whose thoughts are not our thoughts.

Is that clear? Four clearly stated reasons for pain and suffering in Calvin’s theology – all articulated to remove ambiguity and doubt from our daily life – and all conceived of as a way to grace and trust for they all point to God’s loving control of creation even if we do not fully grasp the reason why.

Now it could be that these reasons still work for some of you – it could be that the old ways still seem the best – but I have to tell you I am with the Massachusetts hymn writer, James Lowell, who in 1845 wrote, “new occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient truth uncouth.” Because Calvin’s image and theology of God just doesn’t work for me – it is too narrow, too judgmental and too void of Christ’s grace – and it causes too much needless suffering and guilt in our 21st century world.

Cut to the gospel for this day from Matthew 25 and perhaps we can discern a nuance that will help us come to embrace and maybe even celebrate our doubts and fears as part of the pathway to faith in real life. This parable – about the three servants given talents by their master – has been worked to death in what I think of as boring and pedantic ways over the years. But it can be a truly fascinating glimpse into the way of Christ’s grace and the role doubt plays in experiencing it.

Let’s quickly summarize the action for one another (invite the people to retell the parable) because we all need to start at the same place. Ok, now let’s consider what these symbols are suggesting – and right out of the gate we have to understand that a talent was not a skill or ability but rather a large sum of money. The historians tell us that one talent equaled 76 pounds of silver – roughly the equivalent of 20 years of wages – so two talents is 40 years of wages and five talents meant a free ride for 100 years. So this is all about the master’s generosity, ok? God’s generosity is point one.

Second we have to be certain to grasp that these talents were gifts – not a loan or an investment – they were flat out gifts of generosity that became the property of each of the servants. So what becomes really interesting to me is how these gifts were used: we’re not talking about salvation or grace which God gives to us all equally and freely; rather we’re talking about how the first two servants used their gifts according to their ability – creatively, with curiosity, even a willingness to take some risks – while the other was passive – even lazy – which suggests that being good and faithful has something to do with taking initiative even when we don’t know the consequences.

The first two took their gift and did something with it – they didn’t have to and it was risky – but rather than bury it, they stepped beyond what was safe… and found blessing. And the master called them good and faithful while the other who played it safe was called lazy and stupid. What’s more, one commentator goes so far as to say this: the two creative risk-takers began with a sense that the master was generous and so they multiplied the miracle and entered into joy while the third saw his master as harsh, acted out of fear and wound up in the eternal darkness. Author, Robert Capon, puts it like this:

If we are ever to enter fully into the glorious liberty of the sons and daughters of God, we are going to have to spend more time thinking about freedom than we do. The church, by and large, has had a poor record of encouraging freedom. She has spent so much time inculcating in us the fear of making mistakes that she had made us like ill-taught piano students; we play our songs, but we never really hear them, because our main concern is not to make music, but to avoid some flub that will get us in trouble (page 148). Cited in Brian Stoffregen’s CrossMarks.

Now let me bring this home: For far too long our doubts have not been celebrated or given permission to mature because both our theology and tradition has been too narrow. Calvin did his best in the old days – and still has new insights to teach – but we have to dump that old God of judgment and fear or we’ll never find out what joy our doubts point towards. In fact, if we remain in the gloom of a religion of obligation and fear, we will get exactly what the third servant received: eternal darkness – not joy, not new blessings, not hope or the wedding banquet – just the emptiness of fear and ignorance.

There is much to learn from our doubts – they are in fact a way of actually listening to the voice of our Living God – and I will talk about that next week. But for now the words of Rabbi Brad Hirschfield shall be enough:

Before we start engaging people in grand declarations about how they ought to feel, I would settle for a year of teaching the faithful in every community about the sacredness of modesty, humility questioning, and even doubt as expressions of real faith. When people experience that posture as rooted in the depths of the tradition they love, be it a faith, philosophy or politics, fewer people around the world will die in the names of those traditions… and that would be more than enough for most of us, I think, at least for now.

I’m with you, Rabbi, so let those who have ears to hear: hear.