Scripture: John 20:19-31
I had decided earlier this week that I was not going to preach about doubt today. Many people will, no doubt, be preaching about doubt today. As many of you are aware, there is something called the lectionary, a set of recommended readings for each Sunday of the church year that many ministers base their preaching on. It’s a three year cycle, so normally a given reading would come up once every three years. However, there are a few readings, a very few, that come up in the lectionary every year. This morning’s reading is one of them. No matter which year of the cycle we are in, no matter which version of the Easter story was read the week before, the lectionary gospel reading for the Sunday after Easter is the story from John about the disciple called Thomas who initially did not believe that Jesus had risen and therefore gave his name to the term “doubting Thomas”.
Because of that, over the years I have been in ministry I have preached about Thomas—and his doubt—not every year certainly but many years. And I figured much of what I might have to say about doubt would be things that in one way or another I have said fairly often before at Sojourners, whether I was talking specifically about this Biblical passage or not. And so I thought I would do something else…but I was wrong. Not only did the something else never really materialize, but I kept coming back to doubt as a subject, kept being drawn back to doubt as a subject. Whatever I may or may not have said about doubt in the past, at Sojourners or anywhere else, I decided to just take the word and see where it would lead me this time. And so, as it turns out, I will be one of the many people preaching about doubt today.
The first thing I am going to say about doubt this morning is that it’s a good thing. Many of the sermons being given today I’m sure will say, or will imply, that doubt is not a good thing. They will, most of them I think, recognize that doubt is a part of life, that it is inevitable that it will rise up in us from time to time, that it is even a natural part of being human, but they will end up saying that it is something that believers should earnestly pray to be free of as much as possible. Faith should be rock solid, not riddled with doubt. In many sermons today, doubt will be seen as something that, however natural it may be, ultimately interferes with faith and prevents faith from being as powerful a force in a person’s life as we might wish it to be. And so what I’m thinking of as this category of sermons would encourage people to be faithful or believing instead of doubting, maybe even offer some thoughts about how to ward off doubts or overcome their most harmful effects. Some of these sermons I’m imagining would be good sermons, sermons that I think I would benefit from hearing.
Another group of sermons will take a slightly different tack. They would say, in general, that it’s ok to doubt, not something to be desired but also not something to be afraid of or to be ashamed of, and not something that, when encountered, needs to be resisted, vanquished, or silenced. It will be seen not so much as an enemy of faith as a fact of life that believers learn to live with without beating up on themselves, or anyone else, about it. If a person finds herself doubting many of the tenets that someone somewhere has said are what Christians are supposed to believe, it’s ok. No one believes everything. We all have our doubts about something, even what may seem like crucial parts of Christian belief. But if we have faith even the size of a mustard seed, it will be enough, even if it is surrounded by all sorts of doubts. I do believe it was Jesus, after all, who is reported to have said something to that effect. Doubts are not so much something to be fought against or struggled with as just to be accepted, not granting them the starring role in our inner lives but also not spending a lot of energy getting rid of them, just holding them in our spirits while we go on with our living and our believing. Some of these sermons too, I imagine, as being good sermons, and I know, whether they were good or not so good, I know I have given some sermons along those lines.
But I want to say something different from that this morning. Not just that doubts of many kinds are ok and do not mean a person is a bad person or a bad Christian. Not just that, but doubts are actually a positive thing, a good thing, something to be desired in the Christian life. I have three reasons for saying that. (I could probably come up with more, but I’ll limit myself to three for today.)
First of all, a healthy dose of doubt might go a long way toward saving Christians, or believers of any kind for that matter, from the air of arrogant certainty that it seems can so often accompany religious faith—the “I have the truth and you don’t” syndrome. If a person welcomes sincere doubt as a friend into his inner world, he will not be likely to want to beat anyone else over the head with his truths. He will be inclined to share his doubts as well as his beliefs. And that will be a whole lot better than those who don’t care if they appear arrogant because they have after all discovered the Truth, and also a whole lot better than those who know it’s not such a good idea to appear arrogant but who do know the Truth and are careful to be tactful in the way they beat others over the head with their truths. In this sense honest doubts that are weighty enough they cannot be casually brushed aside can legitimately be seen as gifts from God. I believe we should receive them gratefully.
A second reason why doubt is a good thing, not an enemy and not just ok, is that it produces in the end a stronger and more durable faith. I say this in a spirit similar to Socrates saying that an unexamined life is not worth living. Similarly, an unexamined faith will be a faith lacking in depth and unlikely to last. We make our faith stronger by challenging it ourselves, not waiting for others to do it. Putting beliefs through a process of questioning and revising can do nothing but give the beliefs we do have a firmer foundation. And yet I do not say this with the idea that we go through this process at some early time in our faith formation so as to arrive at some end point where we no longer need to question. It’s an ongoing process, in the spirit of the name Sojourners, which we said early on connotes movement, fluidity, pilgrimage, inclusion of those who do not want set answers but who, instead, want to be in a moving changing relationship to God. Doubt involves us in an ongoing internal dialogue with our believing selves that can strengthen our faith, keep it fresh, and remind us always of our pilgrim nature.
And thirdly, doubt is a good thing because it may serve to emphasize the point that the life of faith includes the life of the mind. When I think of doubt it often has to do with the conflicts between our rational minds and what we presume to be the claims of religious faith: doubts maybe about whether Biblical miracles really occurred or maybe about the dual nature of Christ. I may be stereotyping myself a bit here, but I think of myself at a younger age of being “into” doubt as a kind of an intellectual exercise. And I don’t blame myself for that. What I wanted to know was whether it was possible to be intellectually respectable—what I really mean is intellectually self-respecting—and also be a Christian. My questions were all, or mostly all, legitimate ones. And it took the influence of some real live very intellectually respectable people, who were also Christian, as well as some writings by people I didn’t know, to convince me that it was possible to be a thinking person and a faithful person at the same time. That cleared the way for me to think of myself as a Christian. And so now when I think of doubts in a positive way, one of the things it says to me is that faith does not ask us, should not ask us, to leave our minds behind. Faith is not an anti-intellectual enterprise. The intellect is not irrelevant to faith.
But neither is it, of course, the whole of faith. In fact, it is not even the whole of doubt. I was saying that my image of myself many years ago is that I was a person engaged in an intellectual struggle with the Christian faith, and again I don’t want to imply that I think that was a childish thing or something we outgrow. In some ways I am still engaged in an intellectual struggle with the Christian faith, as I know many of you are. But what has also grown in me is a greater appreciation for the kinds of doubts that come more from the heart than from the mind. I know that as I have experienced it with others and as I have felt it in myself the weightier, the more difficult kind of doubt is the kind that comes from our experiences of loss and of grief. Maybe it’s not even right to call it doubt, since that still has the connotation of a mind matter. Maybe it’s more just questioning or an experience of lostness as opposed to the kind of quiet confidence or assurance we associate with faith. We lose a loved one. The question is not so much: “if God is good, why didn’t God prevent this from happening?” which is the rational form of the question. It is more just “why?” All the different kinds of “whys”, and all the other questions that may be there too. Why did this have to happen? Why now? Why couldn’t it have been me? How do I deal with this? What now? What is to become of me? Just ??? Or we allow ourselves to become emotionally involved with some situation half-way around the earth and similar questions arise: Why does this have to be? How is this even possible? How do I deal with my feelings about this? What is to become of us, this human race that can be so cruel to one another and so accepting of suffering?
The questions in such cases are not really the questions our minds ask. We can ask the question: “If God is good, why do such hard things happen?” But we don’t really expect an answer from the mind. Even if some very smart person could craft an answer that was philosophically sophisticated and intellectually brilliant, our hearts would still hurt. And so as far as this scripture goes, it is not the fact that Thomas takes an intellectual stand—“Unless I see the marks of the nails…I will not believe”—that is important to me. It is the grief I read into the story, and the appearance of a still wounded Jesus, that is important to me. And it is not so much that there is a point to be made here about doubt: that is to be overcome, that it is ok, or that it is a good thing. It’s not so much that there is a position to be taken about the badness or goodness of doubt, but just the suggestion that if God is to be found, if faith is to be found at all, it will be somehow in the midst of, not in any way separate from but in the midst of our doubts, our questions, our griefs and losses and woundedness.
But that leads me to say one last thing for today. Doubt can sometimes take the form of the lostness that comes from grieving or the sense of bewilderment and helplessness involved in taking even some of the world’s harshness into our souls. Doubt can also take the form of something more positive—doubt in the sense of confessing our uncertainty, our unknowingness, in the face of the most profound and persistent questions of our living. It is one thing when those questions come from our grieving. It is another thing when those questions come from the wonder of the miraculous creation of which we are a part and the God who is over, around, under, and within everything that is and who is alpha and omega, beginning and end of all that is. It is possible, it is to be hoped and prayed for, that we may become lost not only in our grieving but in the wonder that blesses us at every moment. It is like doubt, yes, because it is quite different from certainty and quite different even from belief. But it is also like faith in that in that it involves a kind of trust, a giving of ourselves over to the wonder of creation and ultimately the wonder that is God. In the end, doubt and faith may not be enemies; they may not even be separate from each other. They may be very close to the same thing. Amen.
Jim Bundy
April 19, 2009