Doubts?

Luke 24:36b-48

Back when I was a campus pastor, I had running discussions with more than one of my students about doubt and faith.  Their general mode of life was “question everything.”  They would sit in my office and pepper me with question after question, and then pick apart my answers in good intellectual fashion:

How do you know Jesus really rose from the dead?

How do you know there is really a God?

How do you know God is loving and compassionate and merciful and forgiving and all that when the world is such a mess?

Why is there suffering in the world?

And on and on.

These students wanted to have faith.  They really did.  And so, they wrestled and wrestled and wrestled with their questions, begging God in their prayers to take away their doubts.

The problem was, they thought that “faith” meant  “certainty.”   They thought faith meant knowing all the answers.   But faith doesn’t mean certainty.  It means trust.  It doesn’t mean knowing all the answers.  It means being willing to live in the questions.  To be open to the mysteries.  To place ourselves in God’s hands.  To hope against hope even when we cannot see clearly what’s coming next. Having faith doesn’t mean living with no doubts.  It means wrestling with those doubts and trusting that our Lord is in there wrestling with us.  Because, on this side of heaven, the doubts will inevitably come.  There will always be those days when uncertainty rules and fears grip us and anxiety drives our actions and reactions to whatever is swirling in the world around us.

Doubt is all over the place in the Resurrection stories in the Gospels.  It is there, front and center, in this week’s Gospel lesson.  Having just dismissed the women’s report of seeing Jesus alive as an “idle tale,”  (24:11) the disciples respond to the reality of the Risen Christ with doubt and disbelieving.    It took a basic human need…  hunger…  to finally break through their grief-clouded and fear-shrouded disbelief.

The Resurrection is no fairy tale; no idle story told to mollify our mortality.  It is the power and promise of God in flesh and blood for flesh and blood.  It bears witness to the truth that God’s love and life are stronger than suffering and death.

In a way, my questioning young friends were some of the most faith-filled people I’ve known.  In the midst of all their questions and doubts…  they didn’t walk away. They didn’t stop being a part of the community of faith.  They didn’t give up on God.  In their own way, they trusted that God wouldn’t give up on them either, even as they raised their questions and doubts.

I think that’s what this thing called, “faith” is all about.

Frederick Buechner, pastor, poet and author of more than thirty books (who is now in his 90s) once wrote that doubts are the “ants in the pants of faith.”   I believe that.  Doubts have a way of pushing us deeper and deeper into the infinite love that is ours through Jesus Christ.  Always pushing us until we discover again that Jesus is already there, way ahead of us, showing us the way from death to life.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Thanks for reading!