Doubters Anonymous

John 20:19-31 [read text here »]  Psalm 118 (VU 837) [read text here »]

Hi! My name is Chris. I am a doubter.

And if this were an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, everyone here would have answered back with “Hi Chris!”

In the AA Preamble, you can read this statement.

“Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other that they may solve their common problem and help others to recover from alcoholism. The only requirement for membership is a desire to stop drinking.” [http://www.aacanada.com/index.html]

I am forming a new group today called Doubters Anonymous -- or DA for short. We too are a fellowship of men and women and children and youth who share our experience, strength and hope with each other. We even have a patron saint. Can you guess who? That’s right! Our patron saint is Thomas --Doubting Thomas.

·      The only requirement for membership in Doubters Anonymous is a desire to find answers for our doubts and to use our doubts to grow in faith and understanding. This is significant because we are not talking about always being cynical or skeptical about God. And we are not talking about being people who have deliberately decided not to believe in God.

·      There are 4 steps in DA (Doubters Anonymous) instead of the 12 in AA.

(1)  The first step is that we will admit we have doubts about God and about Jesus Christ and about the Bible. In the Gospel of Mark 9:24, an unnamed man uttered these memorable words to Jesus: “I believe! Help my unbelief!” Maybe that could be our motto!

(2)  The second step is that we want to know the truth about Jesus Christ for our daily living. In John 8:31-32, Jesus said to those who believed in him: “If you obey my teaching, you are really my disciples; you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”

(3)  Step 3 is we will use our doubts to seek the truth about God, about Jesus Christ, about the Holy Spirit, about the Bible. In Matthew 7:7, Jesus told his hearers: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.”

(4)  And Step 4 is that, in working through our doubts, we will welcome an opening to embrace personally the truth we learn about Jesus Christ as he meets us in our lives. In John’s Gospel 20:27-28, Jesus told Thomas: “Stop your doubting, and believe!” And Thomas, his questions and doubts answered, responded with faith to Jesus: “My Lord and my God!” 

There is good news and bad news about doubt. Here is what I believe is the bad news that makes a Doubters Anonymous group necessary. Doubting is bad news when it leads to cynicism that cripples us spiritually. And cynicism is a kind of intellectual skepticism that numbs us spiritually. Scott Sernau, in his book Please Don't Squeeze the Christian [InterVarsity Press, 1987, p. 109], made this insightful observation:

“We find ourselves leaving the triumphant lyrics of the old hymns on the church doorstep because they appear hopelessly out of step with the world waiting outside. Our problem is not that we've been taught to question our faith, but rather that we've been taught to reject any answers. Doubt can be a state of mind -- or it can be a way [to] life.” (Bold and italics are mine.)

One of our congregation’s stated values is “freedom to question.” That’s a significant value for any Christian community to possess. Throughout the Gospels, those who followed Jesus were always asking questions about life, about God, about who Jesus was and about what he taught. But the primary issue is not our asking questions but whether we are open to receiving any answers. Or are we more interested in being being skeptics, which is fashionable today? Being skeptical, according to Alister McGrath at Oxford University, is “the decision to doubt everything deliberately, as a matter of principle” [Alister McGrath, Doubting: Growing Through the Uncertainties of Faith, IVP Books, 2006]. Are we really interested in finding answers or are we merely interested in philosophical discussions? Are we really interested in finding answers or are we more interested in “mental acrobatics and the stimulus of a mental hike,” as biblical commentator William Barclay puts it? Are we related somehow to pessimists, whom one person defined as those “who can look at the land of milk and honey and see only calories and cholesterol.”

Doubting is also bad news when doubts are not dealt with. Such doubting always leads to unbelief. This unbelief is the deliberate decision not to bother to seek God because to have faith in God does not matter to us.

Molecular biologist, British theologian and author Alister McGrath, in his insightful book Doubting: Growing Through the Uncertainties of Faith, notes:

“Unbelief is an act of the will, rather than a difficulty in understanding.... [But] doubt often means asking questions or voicing uncertainties from the standpoint of faith. You believe – but you have difficulties with that faith, or are worried about it in some way. Faith and doubt aren’t mutually exclusive – but faith and unbelief are [mutually exclusive].” [p. 14]

Unbelief or doubt?

Parenting Beyond Belief is a recent book written for parents who don’t believe in God. One reviewer explains that the book “aims to help folks who are raising their kids without religion deal with the sticky questions that come up about Santa Claus and heaven,” as well as dealing with other concerns mothers and fathers who are atheists have living “in a culture saturated with talk about God.” [Lisa Miller, “BeliefWatch How To,” Newsweek (7-16-07), p. 10]

One chapter explains how to talk to children about death when there is no belief in life after death. The author recommends telling children: “No, honey, Grandpa won't come home for Christmas. He died and is dead for always.” Then the family performs rituals for remembering Grandpa. This is neither doubt nor faith but clearly unbelief that is an act of the will -- the opposite of faith.

But if we consider doubt within the circle of faith, we soon discover there is also good news to being someone who doubts. Doubting is good news because this indicates we are struggling with our doubts in our desire to grow in our faith and relationship with God. I think those who attend the Wednesday morning Bible study struggle at times with doubt in this way. And that’s a good way!

In dealing with our doubts, part of the issue is who do we trust? We are people who often tend to mistrust God rather than to trust God and, so, doubt often follows. But faith reminds us that trust is fundamental to our relationship with God. Faith is also the channel through which God’s grace and love flow to us. But doubt is something that blocks the channel and the flow of God’s Spirit from giving us the life and blessings God has for us. But knowing this about doubt can be good news! For if we then struggle to resist our inner tendency to mistrust God by pursuing our desire to trust God, we are actually saying we want God in our lives. We want to experience God’s love and grace. We want God’s life-giving Holy Spirit to flow within us.

Our doubting is an indication of our human condition. We are human and not divine. We are created beings. And God is the Creator. And quite simply, we are not God. We are creatures who are severely limited in what we can grasp about the vastness and awesomeness of this amazing universe let alone about God. That’s why revelation is so significant. If we were left to find out about God using our own limited resources, we would not get very far. So God makes himself known to us. God takes the initiative to reveal his love, grace, forgiveness, compassion and justice to all humanity through nature, in Scripture and supremely in Jesus of Nazareth. So we should not beat ourselves up about doubting. Doubting comes with being human. But though we may be Doubters Anonymous, we do not need to remain Doubters Forever!

Remember Doubting Thomas? He is actually a good news person! He is good news for us because his doubt about the message of the risen Jesus spurred him on to want to know the truth about Jesus and to see the evidence for himself. The other disciples -- his friends -- told him they had seen Jesus. Jesus was no longer dead and buried in the tomb, they said. He was alive, they said. He appeared to them, they said. But Thomas was the kind of person who wanted his own encounter – his own experience – with Jesus. I like Thomas. Other than in the lists of the disciples, Thomas is mentioned on only two other occasions in the Scripture. When Jesus heard of his friend Lazarus's serious illness in Bethany, he told the disciples they were going back there. Some of them protested: People want to kill you there, Jesus. But courageous Thomas spoke up: “Let us also go that we may die with him” (John 11:8, 16). Then, in John 14, it was an inquisitive Thomas who asked Jesus where he was going to prepare a place for them. Thomas had his moment of doubt to be sure but he was not a chronic doubter or a cynic or a skeptic or an unbeliever. His identity, despite our perception and description of him, was not rooted only in that moment of doubt after Jesus’ resurrection.

Doubting Thomas is also a good news person because his doubt was the opening for him to embrace personally the truth about Jesus when Jesus did meet him a week later. Thomas did not remain fixed in his doubt. Recall Step 4 of our Doubters Anonymous fellowship: that we will see our doubts as an opening in order to embrace personally the truth about Jesus Christ for ourselves as he meets us in our lives. When Thomas did see Jesus, he responded: “My Lord and my God!” That is awesome statement of faith and love from the one we call Doubting Thomas! Is our response to Jesus Christ anything like Thomas’s?

Presbyterian minister and writer Frederick Buechner wrote a remarkable sermon about Thomas called “The Seeing Heart” [Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons] in which he focused on seeing the truth of Jesus with our hearts. The name Thomas means “twin” in Aramaic. So Buechner sets us up with this thought: “If you want to know who the other twin is, I can tell you. I am the other twin, and unless I miss my guess, so are you.” In referring to his own doubt at times, Buechner is not off the mark. I also recognize myself in Thomas at times. I think a lot of us are related to Thomas!

Often our eyes see facts while our hearts see truth. Buechner said it this way:

“Our eyes tell us that the small country church down the road needs a new coat of paint and that the stout lady who plays the organ looks a little like W.C. Fields and that the pews are rarely more than a quarter filled on any given Sunday. [However, the truth is that] the shabby little church is ... for reasons known only to God ... full of holiness."

Thomas did see some facts about Jesus. He saw the scars of the nails in Jesus’ hands and feet. He saw where the sword had entered Jesus’ side. Can’t you see Jesus taking Thomas’s hand and pressing Thomas’s fingers into his hands and side? But I believe Buechner was right when he suggested that, for Thomas, it was, perhaps, the first time he saw not only “the fact of Jesus” but also “the truth of Jesus and the truth of who Jesus was for him.”

I often pray that you and I may have a similar experience of “seeing the truth of Jesus Christ.” There are some facts about Jesus – an empty tomb, nail-scarred hands and feet, appearances to the disciples, even eating with them. (That’s part of next week’s message, by the way: beside a fire on a beach, broiling some fish for breakfast, where Jesus gave Peter his new marching orders.) I appreciate Buechner’s words about Jesus:

“To see him with the heart is to know that in the long run his kind of life is the only life worth living. To see him with the heart is not only to believe in him but little by little to become bearers to each other of his healing life until we become finally healed and whole and alive within ourselves. To see him with the heart is to take heart, to grow true hearts, brave hearts, at last.”

Jesus left Thomas with a beatitude. But, actually, the beatitude is meant for us! For everyone who has lived after Thomas. In The Message Bible, Jesus says: “So, [Thomas] you believe because you’ve seen with your own eyes. Even better blessings are in store for those who believe without seeing.” Even better blessings!

My friends, may this be so for you and for me. Amen.

Rev. Chris Miller

Easter 2

April 11, 2010