"Faith and Doubt" - Sermon for Suites by the Lake – October 20, 2007
Sermon for Retirement Suites by the Lake - October 20, 2007
[This sermon was for an inter-denominational service for a retirement community]
Mark 9:17-27
An atheist stumbled off the edge of a cliff and as he fell he grabbed onto a tuft of grass and was able to hang there, precariously. Looking down he saw the rough ground a few hundred feet below, looking up he was frightened and decided, in his desperation to call out: “God, if you’re there…please save me!!!”
To his great surprise he heard a deep, resonant voice respond. “I am here. Just trust me and let go, and you will be fine”. So the man called out again, “Is there anyone else up there?!?”
That story is perhaps mildly amusing, but it does suggest that we may find faith in God in the most unexpected of circumstances. Clifford Elliot was a pastor who would say “We are all faithful people, we just need to discover what that faithfulness looks like in our lives”.
Faith, or the desire for faith, can pop up when we do not expect it. Likewise doubt can sometimes surprise us. We tend to think of faith in God and doubt about God as completely separate things, as though they can’t in any way be occurring at the same time. We either have faith or we do not. We either doubt or we do not.
The reality of course is nowhere near that tidy. Human beings are incredibly complex.. I think we know that at a gut level. If we are people who have faith in God, we tend to think of that as an absolute.
But then, when we do experience doubt, we can be unduly shaken. “O no! I find that I can’t trust God in this situation”, or “Yikes! I think I am really holding some bitterness toward God” because of this disappointment or that disappointment.
Or if we don’t claim to have faith in God or to ascribe to any set of beliefs, we also often can think of that as an absolute. But then we find ourselves thinking differently than before. Or we feel perhaps a fluttering of faith in our hearts: “Could there be anything to this?” we might ask ourselves. Or we may long for faith when we see in it others.
I’d like us to think briefly about two simple words: The word: “And”, and the word: “Or”. I want to talk about the genius of the word “And”. I want to talk about the tyranny of the word: “Or”.
First of all, what’s the ‘genius’ of the word “And”? Well, the word “And” links at least two things together. It’s used when there is a choice, when there is not a single clear-cut answer. “And” is a word of inclusion. It’s you and me. It’s this and that. My way and your way.
What’s the tyranny of the word: “Or”? The word ‘or’ suggests exclusion. It’s you or me. It’s this or that. It’s my way or your way.
The genius of the word “And” is that it leaves open possibilities. And I think this is very important when we consider what faith is. When we consider what doubt is.
In our gospel reading today, a father is faced with a crisis. His son is mute and epileptic. And more than simply stating a medical condition, using the language and understanding of his generation, the father recognizes a spiritual aspect of his son’s condition.
He is held back, limited and actively suffering due to his situation. Every father, like every mother, wants the best for their children. It is heart-rending to watch a child suffer.
Now this man has heard about Jesus. Word has gotten around that Jesus REALLY loves people and that He feeds and cares for them, He teaches them AND He has been known to heal people. So this man comes to Jesus, explains his son’s situation, and looks longingly at Jesus for help.
For solace. For a solution to an agonizing problem. “If you can do anything”, he pleads, “take pity on us and help us”. Notice the father includes himself, identifies himself as being in a place of really needing to receive.
"’If you can’?" said Jesus. "Everything is possible for him who believes." That’s quite a statement. “Everything is possible for him who believes”. What do you think Jesus might be getting at?
Sometimes, from the outside looking in, belief or faith in God appears confining, limiting. Like it shuts down thinking and dreaming and aiming high in life. But Jesus is saying that the opposite is the case.
If we think for a moment of faith being like earth or topsoil, faith is the kind of soil that has the potential to grow amazing things. Everything. Every dream. Every hope. Every creative endeavour.
So at the very least, faith asks us for our aspirations. And if we really think about it, Jesus is challenging us to give Him our aspirations, to trust Him, or if we can’t yet do that, to choose to make baby steps toward that trust.
But, we have to ask, “How can I do that when I have a lot of doubt. Or when I have only doubt?
Well, our passage today opens up a new path, a new way to begin our approach to God. Right after Jesus says: “Everything is possible for him or her who believes”, the father in the story exclaims: "I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!"
What!?! “I believe…but help me overcome my unbelief?”
This caring father recognises, even in the midst of his sorrow for his son, that his unbelief is a barrier to something.
Jesus had just said that all things are possible to those who believe. Jesus had raised the stakes, as it were, of faith. He had raised the hopes of this father. I can imagine his thoughts to himself: “Could this be true?
Could this Jesus who is known to love people and to heal people and to do miraculous things…could it be true that healing could come through him to my son?
He dares to ask the question. And he is also very, very honest about what’s going on inside. “I believe”, he says. ‘There is something in me that responds to hope, to a vision of a better life. There is within me a capacity to believe.”
But he also knows himself. He has practiced not believing for a long time. Maybe not believing is familiar and believing is alien.
Nevertheless, we see in this loving father a universal truth about humanity that’s not all that often spoken about very honestly. We have doubt, and we have faith. We have faith, and yet we have doubts.
Both faith and doubt can exist and do exist in us at the same time. For people who say a clear “Yes” to God, the dominant reality in their life is that God is good, that He is love, that He is always loving and giving. And that the relationship we experience with God through faith here and now continues on into the eternity in which God dwells. Sometimes there are questions.
When life brings us pain and sorrow, we commit that pain and sorrow to God, trusting Him to take it and in turn birth healing and hope in us.
Now in our story, once Jesus began the healing of the man’s son, at first, it says, the boy looked so much like a corpse that many said, "He’s dead."
For seconds that must have felt like an eternity to the father, Jesus had perhaps failed. The big and bold promise of “Everything is possible” may have seemed in those seconds like a very cruel joke.
But time didn’t stand still. Jesus took the young boy by the hand and lifted him to his feet, and he stood up. Jesus reached out and brought the boy to his feet. He who was so, so sick and appeared dead, returned to life.
Faith is simply trust. When I married my wife Barbara 20 years ago, although I knew her and loved her for a year and a half before we were married, if I’m honest I have to admit that I really didn’t know her very well. But what I did know of her impressed me deeply.
There was enough evidence very early on that she was the right woman for me, so despite knowing her only 1/1000th of how I do today, I placed a great deal of trust in her. Enough to marry her. That small trust, that small faith, was enough to enable us to enter the adventure of marriage together. Without that trust, I never would have discovered the rewards of being married to Barbara.
Jesus would often say, after teaching the people, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear”. He knew that sometimes people didn’t have ears to hear…they didn’t want to hear or to look at life differently.
In terms of trusting God, the question is, “Do I have ears to hear and eyes to see? Knowing and seeing very little, perhaps only 1/millionth of what there is to know of God, do I sense enough evidence to place even a little bit of trust in God?
Clifford Elliot, as I mentioned, was a pastor who would say “We are all faithful people, we just need to discover what that faithfulness looks like in our lives”. I am grateful for him, because with that statement he opened the door to my brother Craig having faith, living with faith and dying with faith.
If it’s true that we are all faithful people…and I believe it is…if we start from there, perhaps the challenges of faith, the possibilities of faith, are nearer to us than we think.
May we each reflect this week on what faithfulness looks like in our lives. What faith means to us. May we accept that most challenging of ideas…that we do not know all there is to know of life. We see Jesus speaking to us in our passage today, wanting to open our minds and our hearts perhaps to the possibilities of belief. “Everything”, Jesus says, “is possible to him or her that believes”. May we consider these words and the source of these words.
Let’s pray. God, you challenge us to listen to the longings and yearnings of our own hearts, and you challenge us to take baby steps toward you, toward Your embrace. You hold the keys to life and to eternity and you invite us into your presence, to dine with you, to learn of you. To know you and grow in our love for you. May we come to you in faith, be it small or great, and may we learn together to trust in Your goodness and in Your love. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
