Lies My Pastor Told Me#2- Doubt it the Opposite of Faith

Sunday November 2, 2014- Lies My Pastor Told Me #4- James:1: 4-9, Doubting Thomas (John)

                                                            Doubt is the opposite of faith

            A long time ago I learned a very hard lesson that has stood the test of time: There is no one more intelligent than the college freshman.  Ok maybe we should replace intelligent with certain.  Because if you listen to many students across campus who are here for the first time, at least at the beginning, there is a notion of certainty.  They are certain that they want to be an engineer, certain that veterinary school will be what they do with their life, and they are certain that they already know everything they need to know about the world and college is just one big party where you check off an endless list of things to do.  But they have everything already figured out.  I’ve even had students who I’ve reached out to say, I’ll let you know if I need any advice, but I’m pretty good.

To which I say, of course GOOD LUCK.

            Because when you really get into it, and perhaps when 4 years later you realize you are actually going to graduate with a degree, you begin to realize that you well, you don’t know much of anything.  Some of you might be wonderful why and how the school might actually give you a degree when you realize just how little you know.  And perhaps that feeling of uncertainty can be helpful, especially when it comes to examining the scriptures and exploring faith as a part of ones life.

            It wasn’t actually that long ago that Christianity itself started to become a religion about certainty, about fact versus truth.  For those of you who may not have heard it in theological discussions, fact is like how science makes sure that something exists in the world.  Truth is how something exists that although not perfect, has merit.  As the native American storyteller says, Now I don’t know if the story happens exactly this way (fact), but this story is true.   In fact, it wasn’t until the enlightenment where Christianity was placed on a pedestal of truth.  People had heard so many different things about religion, mostly from priests because people couldn’t read, but the englightenment forced the hand of religion and made the faith traditions across the world separate fact from fiction.  In response, religions started to take sacred scriptures and put historical value to them.  The garden of eden actually happened, Moses did in fact part the Red Sea, Joshua literally had thousands of people killed in Israel in order to claim the land that God had actually given them.  All these things became fact, not narrative storytelling to make sense of the world.

And when they became fact, they became dangerous.

Nowadays, Christianity has firmly been swept up in a notion of this fact finding.  We are looking often for the Bible Answer Man, and when we find him, we ask questions, they provide us answers, and then we get on with our lives.  There is no discussion, no dispute, no doubt, because to do so is to be a lesser representation of Christ in the world.  To have doubt about faith is to simply move toward rejection of the faith itself.  Or is it?

Annie Dillard, one of America’s most known poets and authors once remarked that Doubt is not the opposite for faith: Certainty is.  And in fact, grammatically she is correct.  Certaintly means that you need not have faith about something.  Once we have proved gravity exists, then we need not have faith in it, for it is fact.  But faith is about believing things that you can not see and can not touch and that you simply have to have hope in.

But before we become so tied up in language, I want to consider that doubt it almost impossible to avoid.  I doubt that my dog is currently at home eating food from the table, but buttercup has been known to do it.  I doubt that I will ever get the chance to go into space or set foot on the moon, but if I live long enough, you never know.  I do have faith though that tomorrow morning the Sun will rise, and although there is some sort of faith behind it, you never know.  I have to trust that things will turn out alright, even when things are challenging and difficult.  And if they do, that’s great.  But there is no certainty.

In the scriptures today, we find two lessons which appear to counter one another.  James, in his opening encounter, tends to be the more challenging here.  But James is simply helping the persons he is talking with maintain composure.  He says, just trust God, don’t doubt that God will be with you and will respond.  This is a difficult lesson.  To have faith for him means you have to let go of doubt, and while he has a nice point, I simply disagree.  To be honest with you, I didn’t want to use this passage, but I did so that you could see that not everything in the Bible can be fully agreed with by this pastor.  I doubt that James is right.

The second scripture though speaks to my point.  You may have heard it before as it is read in Church almost every year on the Sunday after Easter. Doubting Thomas.  The guy who just couldn’t believe without seeing and touching and well, physically examining Jesus.  And how does Jesus respond….well he shows up.  And Thomas is shown what he needs to see.  And surprisingly enough, Jesus doesn’t scold him.  He shows him, and he believes.

This leads me to a point about this whole language thing.  What most Christian groups want from you is belief, which is not the same as faith.  You might believe that God exists, but having faith in God’s power is a different thing.  And to have faith like that, well, if you aren’t doubting once a in while, I’m not sure you are doing it right. But remember, don’t believe everything that pastor says.  What I can tell you is that honestly, I doubt all the time.  I doubt I’m doing the right thing, that I’m saying the right things, that I know much of anything about this tradition.  Sometimes I am simply a doubter who keeps preaching.  John Wesley actually dealt with all of this a few hundred years ago when he was preaching in Georgia.  Confronting Peter Bohler, a friend, Wesley remarked that while he believed in the gospel, he had doubts as to whether it was meant for him.  Jesus he said, saves others, but did he really save me?  And he feared he could not go on.  Bohler simply understood his doubt and told him to keep going, preaching faith until he had it, and then preaching faith because he had it.

Doubt is inevitable.  And in fact, it may be more imbedded in the Biblical story than we know.  Thomas has always been seen as the bad guy, the position of doubt, the one who just couldn’t get it right. But Thomas wasn’t actually his name, it was his nick name.  Didymus was actually his name, and as I have said to some of you, names are VERY important in the narrative.  Didymus just happens to be “Twin” in  Aramaic, Jesus’ native tongue.  Now you may have heard that Thomas, who was the twin, language before.  But the narrative tells us that this means Thomas may have been so like Jesus in characteristics, so giving of himself like Jesus, that he came to take on the name Twin.  And this group of disciples and the rabbi that leads them are looking for people to imitate.  In fact, the disciples who job is to become like Jesus, thus Twin is a pretty highly esteemed name to pick up on this journey.

My point is that if Thomas is the Twin of Jesus, and Thomas is the example of doubt and Jesus is the example of faith, perhaps the two are not so far different from each other that they can not and should no coexist.  They are like two sides of the coin that can not exist without one another.  Faith without doubt will never lead to greater faith, which may lead to more doubt.  It is an endless cycle that I think I can live with.

In the end, I believe that if someone has ever told you that you are not allowed to doubt this tradition, or if you are not sure of your beliefs than you must be wrong, I apologize.  I believe Christianity has never been a faith about strict and blind belief but is a tradition that requires us to keep examining and exploring, which will untimately lead to at times doubt.  Frankly, I like it that way.  It makes the journey that must more interesting. 

May it be so

Amen.