Henrietta United Church of Christ

Rev. David Inglis April 3, 2005

John 20:19-29

“Doubting and Faithing

I have to admit, Doubting Thomas is my kind of guy. He’s not the type to let wishful thinking substitute for the nitty-gritty reality that is in front of him. If Jesus is dead, you might as well accept reality as quickly as possible, put your life back together as best you can, and get on with dealing with what is, not what you wish it was. Yeah, I like Thomas. You can trust him because he doesn’t hand you anything he hasn’t already sifted through for the truth.

When I think about Thomas, I think about the part that doubt has played in my own spiritual journey. And I have to admit, it has played a big one. But I agree with what the great theologian Paul Tillich said: “Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it is an element of faith.” And Ambrose Bierce, an American writer, journalist and editor, said, “Where doubt is, there truth is–doubt is truth’s shadow." So I guess Doubting Thomas and I are in good company. Maybe you find yourself in that company too.

So I will tell you something most preachers won’t tell you. Don’t be afraid of your doubts. If you pursue them with an open mind and an open spirit, they will lead you to a deeper faith. Because “doubt is truth’s shadow.” And wherever the truth is, God always shows up. God always lives in the truth.

In my own faith journey, when I was a youth, I doubted everything that had been handed down to me. If I was going to believe something, it had to be because I believed, not because somebody told me to believe it. So I started right at the top and doubted the existence of God. In time, it was doubting the God of my childhood that opened me to a God that made my adult mind bow before God in awe and reverence.

And I doubted that some of the stories in the Bible were scientifically or historically true. But it was doubting the Bible as a scientific document that opened it up to me as a spiritual document, that teaches truths that are both higher and deeper than what science can teach us. For example, if I look at the beginning of the book of Genesis as a story about spiritual truth rather than as an historical account about the first two human beings, I am forced to see Adam as myself. The name Adam means “man.” And I recognize my own inclination to use my free will to take things into my own hands and try to decide for myself what’s right and wrong. That’s what makes me human. And that’s what gets me kicked out of the natural order the Bible calls the Garden of Eden, and sets me at odds with the world. Then I saw that the rest of the Bible is a book about how people tried to find their way back to God as fallen human beings with free will and temptations and struggles, and it is a book about how God came to them and spoke to them and lived among them and forgave them in all their humanness.

And I doubted that Jesus was a kind of deity merely disguised as a human being. I doubted that that he knew everything and was all powerful and didn’t face real temptations or suffer the limitations of being human and knowing human pain. But it was seeing him as a human being who knew vulnerability, temptations, fear, suffering, and death that gave me his example of how to deal with these things. And a funny thing happened. Once I embraced Jesus in his humanness, my eyes began to be opened in a new way to how powerfully God’s divine Spirit shone through him, and how fully he was able to embody–or incarnate–God’s Spirit. And this has awakened me to the potentials we all have as sons and daughters of God, as we learn to empty ourselves of our human nature and open to our divine nature. Now I’ve come to doubt my own skeptical doubts that Jesus walked on water and calmed a storm and raised the dead. Jesus has helped me let go of my limited preconceptions of what is possible and what it means to be human, when you are totally open to God.

And how about Jesus’ grand finale–walking out of death in the tomb to life in the world? This is beyond anything my human mind can understand or prove. I haven’t had the benefit of putting my hands in Jesus’ wounds, like Thomas did. But all the evidence points to the fact that something powerful happened to change those cowering, confused disciples into bold proclaimers of an astounding story–one that they were all willing to risk their lives for. And my own experience attests to the fact that there is afoot in this world of ours, and even in this church of ours, a living Spirit of love and truth and grace that resonates with the Jesus I read about in the Bible.

So my persistent doubts have brought me full circle. Sir Francis Bacon said, “If one will begin with certainties, they shall end in doubts; but if one will be content to begin with doubts, they shall end in certainties.” That was true for Thomas. It’s been true for me. And maybe it’s true for you. But even though doubting opens the door from a superficial, second-hand faith to a deeper faith, doubting can’t get us through the doorway into the place where God lives. That’s why Jesus told Thomas, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” To make contact with the Ultimate, we need, not doubting, but faithing. I put “faith” in a made-up verb form, because if we just see faith as a thing–a set of beliefs that we possess, it easily becomes something that we use to decorate our life with, or bar the door against the changes and uncertainties of life, or make us feel superior to those who lack it. And once our ego takes possession of our faith, it loses its power to carry us through the doorway to God. We have to leave our ego at the door.

Faith at its most potent is a stance towards life that we have to be in moment by moment. Faith is the humble awareness that there is a Power, a Truth, a Love, a Life that is greater than we are, and that we are a part of. When we doubt, we are saying that we are center of our own universe, we are a separate entity in it, and our perspective and desires and judgments will be the highest authority in our lives. We are Adam and Eve deciding to eat of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. But when we live in faith, we become open to God’s higher truth, higher love, higher wisdom, and higher power ordering our lives, empowering us and transforming us into God’s own likeness. Instead of being Adam and Eve in the garden, we are Jesus in the wilderness, resisting the temptations to use his power for his own selfish gain. And we are Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, saying, “Not my will, but thine be done.”

Doubt’s basic stance is No. Doubt can serve us when it says No untruths, or to partial truths that have become insufficient to sustain us. Faith’s basic stance is Yes. Faith picks up where doubt leaves off when it stretches to embrace the Ultimate, the Highest, the Greatest, that is always beyond our grasp, beyond our understanding, beyond our words. We become a part of God and God becomes a part of us through our faith and its attributes–reverence, awe, gratitude, love, and trust.

Our egos don’t mind having a faith we can polish up and put on a shelf for show and bring it out when we need it. But faithing moment by moment is hard, because our egos hate to trust anything but ourselves. Faithing means trusting, and trust always feels like a great risk. To the ego, doubting always feels safer, because it closes the door to risk. But doubting also closes the door to life and to God.

Some wise person wrote,

To live is to risk dying. To hope is to risk despair, and to try is to risk failure. To laugh is to risk appearing the fool. To weep is to risk being called sentimental. To reach out to another is to risk involvement. To place your ideas and your dreams before a crowd is to risk being called naive. To love is to risk not being loved in return. But risks must be taken, because the greatest risk in life is to risk nothing. The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing, and becomes nothing. That person may avoid some suffering and some sorrow, but they simply cannot learn and feel and change and grow and love and live. Chained by things that are certain, they are a slave. They have forfeited their freedom. Only the person who risks is truly free.