What To Do When You Doubt

“What To Do When You Doubt”

Message @ Jericho Ridge– Sun, March 14, 2021 (Series: Disillusioned)

Hello, friends.  Welcome into this online space for a time of learning and exploration together. My name is Brad. I’m part of the teaching and leadership team here at Jericho Ridge. 

One morning earlier this week, I went for a run with my dog. We struck out on a trail that we have run many, many times but suddenly the little clip of her leash broke and she was happily trotting along and I kind of lost her in the morning mist.  Actually, it was more than a mist: it was a real spring fog. 

Because the fog was so deep, suddenly, a trail that seemed so familiar felt like I didn’t know where it was taking me.  The fog was making it very hard to see and I suddenly felt lost and disoriented.  I tried slowing down, that didn’t seem to help.  I tried speeding up but I still felt I didn’t know where I was.  I came to what should have been a familiar juncture that I’ve run probably hundreds of times and yet I was confused as to which way to go.  I eventually found the dog and found my way back up the hill to where the sun was now breaking through, but I was reminded again how fog has a very disorienting feeling to it.  It’s very easy to get lost in the fog, even in familiar terrain.  

Sometimes the journey into or out of faith can be like that.  Maybe you’ve had an experience where you’ve read a Scripture passage hundreds of times and then one morning, something unnerves you about it and you feel disoriented.  Maybe you hear news about yet another Christian leader who has experienced moral failure and you begin to lose trust in those in spiritual authority.  Maybe you grow up in a Christian bubble and then transfer to a public school and you meet people who you were always told were horrible sinners going to hell but they seem so nice and you begin to question things that seemed so clear to you before.  This place of feeing lost, of being disillusioned and feeling like the way forward is unclear can be very, very disorienting.    

So today we are starting a mini-teaching series on the topic of DOUBT.  We’ll be exploring what it is and what it isn’t.  What to do with your doubts and how to walk with those who wrestle or who have questions.  I want to set your expectations in the right place – in a 4 weeks series of 20 minute talks, we are not going to “solve” everything for you, but I do hope we can open up conversation that you’ll find constructive and maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to make your way forward a bit in the spaces and places that feel foggy.

Let me first say a word to the kids who are watching. Some of you who are younger viewers may not identify with all of the things we are going to be discussing in this series BUT here’s one thing that I want you not to miss: that as you grow up in or around this community, this is a safe place for dangerous questions.  Nothing you say will scare or weird us out. No question you can ask Pastor Jenna or Pastor Jason will make us love you any less. This is a community that can handle your deepest doubts and your hardest questions and your biggest feelings. Bring your whole self. 

Actually, that is true for you who are adults as well.  If you find yourself either presently, or at some time in your past or in the future in a place where the world seems foggy, you feel lost, and disillusioned, know that you are not alone.  If easy answers are not working for you anymore, you are in good company with the doubters, the dreamers and seekers here at Jericho as we stumble forward together.  

 And while everyone’s journey with doubt is unique, there are also some common threads that we can trace out with respect to where doubt comes from and what we choose to do with it.  There can be many valid reasons that we enter seasons of doubt in our lives.  We can be moving along just fine and then life’s experiences crack open new ‘what if’ questions in our minds.  Sometimes doubt is brought on by places of deep pain and loss and we start to ask hard questions about why God, if God exists, would let something like that happen.  

Sometimes doubt is brought on my negative experience with religion. People get hurt by the people or toxic culture of a church or they begin to learn more about some of the harm caused by institutional decisions throughout history and it shakes their faith.  Sometimes people begin to learn or explore more deeply in areas of science of theology and as they read more broadly, the questions get bigger and bigger and the weight of new discovery and its non-integration into their pervious view of life becomes a real challenge.

Whatever pathway has brought you to the place where easy answers don’t work anymore, the real question isn’t so much what brought you here but “what do you do now?”  Or if you are a compassionate bystander, you might be wondering “how do I help a friend or family member who is in the process of deconstruction or who is experiencing doubt at such a deep and profound level that it feels like they may never emerge from the fog that they are in?”  

Friends, these are hard questions.  And I don’t want you to expect that you’ll emerge from our times together with easy answers.  But what I do want to provide for us today is a bit of a framework for what to do when we doubt.  Because you are going to end up doing something with your doubt.  I want to suggest that there are four basic choices you can make when you feel lost in the fog.   

First, you can repress doubt – pushing it down to the deepest recesses of your mind and soul, but that usually only works for a period of time until it comes back, usually stronger and with reinforcements.  

Secondly, some people in Christian communities demonize doubt and think that it is a sin.  They hold up certainty as the most noble way to be a Christian.  The challenge with this is that if you are the one with questions, you end up feeling or being marginalized and ostracized from your community simply because you begin to wonder out loud about things that are not “on brand”. 

A third group of people idolize doubt and place it on a pedestal as the grandest of accomplishments.  There is currently a massive cottage industry about the topic of deconstruction with accompanying books, podcasts, conferences, gurus and practices and pathways you can walk to shed the repressive views of your youth and the naivete of your church of origin so that you can look down your nose at others who have not evolved as far or as fast as you on a given issue or spectrum. 

But I want to suggest to you that there is another option.  A fourth way to treat doubt that has proven healthier yet also harder down through the centuries.  Instead of repressing or demonizing or idolizing it, what if you chose to embrace it.  To befriend your doubt.  To treat it and yourself and others with gentles and respect and to live into it as a place of possibility where you can meet God and yourself and others more deeply than you ever thought was possible.  I invite you to come with me on this journey of exploration where you come to see doubt, not as an enemy or a destination, but as a as a pathway of opportunity to choose deeper faith. 

I also want to assure you that you’re not the first person in history have big or hard questions.  Think about the stories of those in Scripture who have bumped up against doubt.  Sarah, the matriarch of the book of Genesis, receives a promise from God that she and Abraham will have a child in their old age.  And her first response upon hearing the news was not wonderful, faith-filled receptivity.  It was doubt.  Actually, it wasn’t just doubt, it was flat our hysterical disbelieving laughter.  Or think about Jacob, in Genesis 32, whose wrestling match with God forms a kind of powerful invitation for you and me to not be content with two-dimensional, flimsy distant deity.  Or think about the writers of the Psalms.  Here were people who knew how to cry out and express their questions to God.  We love to read and sing the happy ones, but go back and read through the Psalms and you’ll see piles of unanswered questions and groanings.  Pastor Wally will be walking us through Psalm 73 next week as a sample of this kind of engagement.  Or the prophets who wanted answers from God that they seemed not to get.  

In the New Testament, we have Paul who begs God to take away a painful limitation of some kind that he labels as his thorn in the flesh.  He repeatedly begs God and God says politely but clearly ‘no’.  But I will give you my strength in your area and time of weakness.  Or Peter, the disciple who follows Jesus most closely but who also denies him most loudly.  Or Judas, whose story we will explore more compassionately on Palm Sunday or Thomas a person whose very name has become associated with doubt whose story we will explore on Easter Sunday. 

What I want you to see clearly is that if you doubt, you are in good company!  The pages of history and of the Bible are FULL of people like you with real hurts, real hang ups and very real questions.  Part of this is just the nature of what it means to be human.  Doubt is a normal part of the life of faith.  It is not a swear word, it’s not something to be feared.  Doubt can in fact be a healthy thing for us as it forces us to examine our lived convictions more carefully and deeply.    

Doubt can feel scary though because it feels a bit like you are walking in a fog.  I think it is helpful to acknowledge is that part of what creates doubt is the very human reality that there are limitations on our knowledge.  The early church leader Paul wrote in I Corinthians 13:12 that we “Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.”  In other words, to not know everything means you are human.  And if you and I cannot know everything, then the very real possibility exists that doubt is a normal part of the human condition. 

So hear me clearly on this: Doubt does not disqualify you from engaging with faith.  Doubt is many things, it is disorientating, it is painful, it can be emotionally and hard to endure BUT… it can also be the doorway to a deeper and more beautiful faith.  To doubt is to be human.    

In his excellent book entitle “When Faith Fails” writer and pastor Dominic Done uses the analogy of a marriage relationship.  If I know absolutely everything there is to know about my wife, Meg, there is a kind of stagnation that comes into our relationship.  But if I can maintain a kind of curiosity and wonder that I don’t know all there is to know about her, then this is the doorway to a deeper relationship.  The same is true with doubt.  If we idolize certitude, thinking that we know all there is to know about God, about theology, about ourselves, then we actually kill the possibility of vibrant relationship.  But “mystery is the life blood of intimacy”.  And allowing for mystery means we allow for some wiggle room for doubt. 

So in order to understand the dynamic around doubt a bit better, turn with me in your Bibles or on your device to the book of Jude.  This tiny letter tucked away at the back of the New Testament has mostly negative things to say about wierdos who are working hard to distort faithful Christian teaching and so there are lots of warnings.  And you might think that when it comes to doubt, Jude would be very dour and give stringent advice like ‘nip it in the bud’ or ‘make sure those people get right theology quickly!    

But as he closes out his letter, after acknowledging that there will be scoffers and divisive people who take deep delight in sowing doubt and divisions, and after saying that yes, there will be those who are going to be subject to judgement for their actions, Jude says something powerful about doubt.  Specifically about how to engage with it and with persons who are experiencing doubt.

Look at Jude 1:21-22, I’ll read it in the New International Version: “Keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life. 22 Be merciful to those who doubt.”

What a powerful statement packed into those two verses. That even in our places of doubt, we are still within a space where God’s love and God’s mercy are the primary orientations of the Trinity toward us.  Friend, if you are watching or listening and you identify as a doubter, know this: that your hard questions do not put your out of the reach of the loving presence of God.  I love what author Bob Goff says “doubt is not how faith ends, but how deep trust begins.” 

Some of you may be in a place where your doubts are still strong and you are holding back from moving to a place of relating to God until you get them all answered.  Can I let you in a little secret?  You doubts may never go away!  You may always live with a nagging sense of ‘what if’s’ or a sense that you don’t know for sure.  If that is you, friend, I want to invite you to keep walking on this journey.  This is a journey of faith and sometimes the deeper we get into those places of relationship with God, the more we experience mystery and wonder and questions. 

Because faith is foundationally a relational journey with God, not a destination of certitude about God.  So I invite you to take the next step on this Jesus journey with me.  Sometimes we use the language of inviting Jesus into your life but today I want to invite you to consider responding to Jesus’ invitation for you to become part of His life.  So if you want to say yes that that invitation, I want you to email or if you are watching on our Church Online interactive platform, respond to the invitation to raise your hand that is coming up on your screen now.  Don’t wait till you have all your questions answered.  Start walking the road of relationship with God and with other people today. 

Speaking of other people, let me speak for a moment to those who are not currently in a season of disillusionment.  Our core response to those who have questions matters.  And so when a friend comes to you and says something like “I’m not sure I believe that God exists” or “I can’t get past the violence in the Old Testament and it is shaking my view of who God is” or “the more my professor talks about scientific naturalism, the more I am drawn to that”… you have a choice as to how you respond.  Be thoughtful but above all, Jude reminds us that our primary calling is to be merciful. 

You might want back the dump truck up and give your doubting friend or family member all all the things you found helpful in your faith journey.  But can I gently admonish you to try hard not to make this about YOU.  They may not need more information, apologetics podcasts or books suddenly appearing at their doorstep… What they need most from you and from us might just be MERCY.  Mercy doesn’t only mean soft hugs, it can also mean speaking truth into the lives of those who are actively pursuing a kind of doubt that is self-destructive.  But even there, mercy needs to triumph over an attitude of self-righteousness or judgement. 

Now, let me pause and make a distinction here that I think we need to talk about.  And that is a distinction between doubt and unbelief.  The New Testament uses two very different words for those experiences but sometimes we flatten that distinction and use doubt to describe both things.  But they are actually two different postures.  In James 1:6 the image is used of a tumultuous sea where there are waves tossing you two and fro.  And the text says:

“If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you. 6 But when you ask, you must believe and not doubt, because the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. 7 That person should not expect to receive anything from the Lord. 8 Such a person is double-minded and unstable in all they do.” 

The word “doubt” here means to be unsure.  To be of two minds about something and wavering between the options.  And when we are unsure about something, we are invited to pursue it more deeply.  This is why when Jesus meets people who are exploring who are unsure, He says things like ‘you are not far from the Kingdom’ or he praises faith in those who are not certain but who are seeking. 

Being of two minds about something is not an uncommon state – you might not be sure as to which new phone to buy or what to do for Spring break.  But when we find ourselves unsure, we usually need to press into the decision and the information more to get a sense of clarity.  This is what James is inviting us to do here.  Pastor Wally is going to preach next weekend about how to pray our doubts so I don’t want to steal any of his thunder here I would simply invite you to tune back in and keep the congregation going with us online or via phone or email.

But being unsure or doubting is different than having a heart that is hardened by unbelief.  Think about the man whose son was oppressed by the demonic.  In Mark 9, he comes to Jesus and says “Jesus, I’m not sure where to turn.  I need your help.”  And Jesus doesn’t say “um, let me stick the ‘belief-o-meter into your soul and get a reading”  Jesus simply invites the man into a deeper place of exploration of Jesus’ capacity to meet the need of his son for divine freedom.  And the man cries out: “I do believe, but help me overcome my unbelief!”

Friend, that might be you today.  Doubt in your life has gotten you to a place where you are stalled out. Your take-away from today might be that you need to lean in.  Keep asking questions about the bible, about science, about God being silent.  Your journey, however, needs to not just be an intellectual one but one that involves all of you. Your questions, your emotions, your heart and your head. Aterall, “Courageously confronting our doubts is how we grow.”   

As you grow and learn and press in, it might also be time for you to admit that your doubt is actually a protection mechanism for not wanting to make a change that God is inviting you into and it might, at some point, be time to let that doubt go. 

There is a marvelous line in the movie Life of Pie, where he says “Doubt is useful for a while… But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”  Some forms of doubt are unhelpful and need to be gently left behind.   

I love that one of the most powerful stories of doubt I have read is not the books of the new Atheists ,but the journals of Mother Theresa.  Here was a woman who writes at one point: “I am devoured by doubt” and yet she continues to press into service, love and deep places of justice and hope. 

Let’s go back to our fog analogy as we wrap up the teaching time today.  If you or a family member is in a season of disorientation and doubt, I want you to mercifully do some digging to see what lies beneath the fog.  Sometimes, under the blustering tweets and podcasts about deconstruction is actually a hurt and wounded person who has a legitimate question that never got answered.  And their expression of doubt was demonized or weaponized against them to the point that they walked away from faith. 

If that is you, friend, I want to say how deeply sorry I am that you had that kind of experience with Christian community.  I may not have been part of that, but I want to own that and apologize for it.  In an effort to hold up truth, sometimes we get the mercy part wrong.  For the wounds that are real and for the isolation you feel, I am sorry.  I hope you can find a place in your heart to journey with us and to lean in to your questions in a healthy and healing way.  Your past or present doubts and the pain they have caused do not disqualify you from participation in the life of Jericho. 

Well, there is much more that needs to be said about this topic and so I want us to pause for a moment and invite God to speak to you, whenever you are and in what ever spiritual state you find yourself in.  What is God inviting you to embrace and what is God inviting you to leave behind?  Perhaps the invitation is to leave behind cynicism or that past hurt.  Perhaps your invitation is to reach out to a friend of family member whom you have wounded in the past by your lack of mercy and to own it and apologize that you came on to strong and potentially ruptured the relationship.  Sit with that question for a few minutes as we move into a time of worship response.   What is God inviting me to embrace?  What is God inviting me to leave behind?   

We have a practice of responding to what we hear by adding our voices to the conversation in song here at Jericho.  Sometimes those songs are about God and God’s work in our lives and in the world.  Sometimes those songs are very personal and about US.  The words to this next song might resonate deeply with you.  If you are in a season of doubt, you might feel caught or trapped and the one thing I want you to hear and sing out, even if perhaps you don’t fully yet believe it, is that you are loved despite the struggles of your faith.

So as we enter into this time, I invite you to respond as God leads you.   Let’s sing together…

Benediction:

Friends, our benediction today comes from Canadian pastoral theologian and poet Carol Penner who writes on the website Leading Worship:

You call us to be people of faith,
yet we are often people with doubts…
You specialize in impossibilities;
you walked on water,
you heal the nations
you forgive sins
you set the captive free,
you set us free from our captivities.

This morning we pray for people here who are filled with doubts,
who wonder whether you exist and whether you are listening to our prayers,
who wonder what this whole community is about.
We pray for people who doubt the purpose of life,
who wonder whether to end it all,
who face feelings of meaningless and despair.
Even when we have that sinking feeling,
give us the wisdom to turn to you.
Lord we want to believe, help our unbelief!
Give us faith, small as a mustard seed,
so that we can be your faithful people,
believing in your power to save,
believing in your power to reign supreme,
believing that we can share this good news
with everyone we meet.
We ask all this in Jesus’ name, Amen.

~ written by Carol Penner, and posted on her Leading in Worship blog.  http://carolpenner.typepad.com/

Thanks for being with us.  We’ll see you next week when Pastor Wally explores how to pray our doubts back to God in the language of the Psalms.