Doubts

What follows is a capsule version of what I preached on for the first Sunday of Lent.  It seemed an important enough message for the season, that I include it here for all of you that were not among us that day.  I can only beg the indulgence of those of you that already struggled through the longer version in church.

This is the first week of Lent.  In the church, we start Lent each year by reading the story of Jesus going out to the wilderness for forty days and nights to fast and be tempted by the devil.  Of course we read this story in a metaphorical sense.  We don't actually believe that there was some guy with horns and a pitchfork out there in the wilderness talking to Jesus.  Jesus may not have even gone to the wilderness except in the metaphorical sense.  The ancients didn't have a way of talking about their internal life (emotions, inner dialogues, the unconscious) except by externalizing in stories.  But what the story is about, of course, is Jesus wrestling with his doubts.  We are told that he didn't choose to go to the wilderness but was "driven" there by the Holy Spirit.  And so before he can do whatever it is he decides to do with his life, first he has to sort out his own inner life of faith.  He confronts his doubts, he tests his faith, he "tries on" a variety of ideas for how to live out his faith.

All of this has prompted me to think a little more fully about doubts.  Perhaps the best place to start is with an analogy between religion and science.  While many people think about science as a body of knowledge, that's not really what it is.  The knowledge gained through the scientific method is the aim, but the "science" is the methodology.  Science is a methodology for objectively discovering how the world works.  The method is fairly simple.  We observe closely a given phenomenon and based on observation we develop a hypothesis about how that phenomenon occurs.  And then we test that hypothesis.  The test, of course, is an experiment designed to prove or disprove the hypothesis.  If the experiment is well designed, it is a success either way.  If the hypothesis is proved, then we know how things work.  If it is disproved, then we have eliminated one of the options for how to understand it.  Either way we gain knowledge.  Once enough understanding is gained we might be able to construct a "theory" that tries to explain something far broader.  But the theory is always provisional because all of the data about a broad issue is never quite in.  The theory gets altered, amended or tweaked to accommodate new bits of knowledge.  A body of knowledge grows out of this kind of experimental exploration but it is the method that is the science.

So too with our religions.  At heart, religions are not a body of doctrines or dogmas that we are called upon to believe.  They are instead spiritual methodologies.  Religions are traditions that have grown up to help us get closer to whatever it is that we call God or to get to a greater spiritual depth in our own lives.  Each religion gives us a collection of methodologies for accomplishing this.  Buddhism teaches that a life of meditation, non-attachment, and discipline gets one to a spiritually deeper place.  Islam prescribes a prayer ritual several times each day, a regime of generosity, a system of sharia law, and a once in a lifetime pilgrimage as part of the methodology for reaching a more realized relationship with God.  In Christianity we believe in regular worship, lived out compassion and the power of a loving community as the methods for reaching a greater spiritual depth.  The doctrine and dogmas of our religions are secondary to the central purpose, which is to get closer to God.  If the doctrines help and abet that purpose, they are good, if they do not then they should be rejected.  Remember that "faith" is the heart of our religion not belief.  Belief is what is going on in our heads, faith is what is happening in our hearts.  Belief is what we think about God, faith is our relationship with God.

All of this long discourse is just a way of getting to the business of our doubts.  Because doubts play the same role in our religions as experimentation plays in science, and doubt is just as important.  Usually, Christians have been taught to fight their doubts-- that doubts are bad and that they undermine and erode our faith.  If we have doubts, we have been so often taught to strap on the helmet of belief a little more tightly to expel or suppress those doubts.  But remember that Jesus is driven into the wilderness of doubt by the Holy Spirit.  His doubts are the very spirit of God working in him.  Doubts are not the enemy of faith, they are the single most important part of the methodology of faith.  Doubts are the spirit of God sending us a message.

Doubt is a cognitive dissonance, whether conscious or unconscious.  We doubt because something is wrong in our heads or hearts.  When what we know from common sense or life experience is at odds with what we've been taught to believe, we have doubts.  Religious authorities might prefer us to tamp down those doubts and in the conflict of belief with reality, let our connection to reality yield.  But this puts our faith on a very shaky and uncertain foundation and it does a disservice to truth, which is part of what God is about.  When we experience the cognitive dissonance of doubt, Jesus' example would seem to be the better one; let those doubts drive us into the metaphorical wilderness to sort things out.  If a doctrine of the church is something that we doubt, then we either do not understand it deeply enough or it is wrong.  Either way, the process of taking our doubts seriously and wrestling to get to the heart of them makes us deeper spiritually and closer to God's truth.  Doubts are God's gift.  Either we get a more profound understanding of one of the doctrines of the church or we discover that that doctrine doesn't work as a methodology of faith and then we reject it.  Like an experiment in science, wrestling with a doubt succeeds either way.

Even our deepest doubt should be taken seriously.  Our deepest doubt, of course, is about the existence of God itself.  All of us have experienced doubts about God's very reality.  These doubts are the most crucial.  As Martin Buber wrote, "Any God that can be killed should be killed."  In other words, if we doubt the existence of God then our God is too small.  God is beyond our comprehension and so all of our images of God and ideas about God are truly provisional (we should learn from science and have no dogmas or doctrines, but only theories), our doubts push us past the petty and shallow ideas that we have about God to deeper ones, bigger ones, truer ones.  If you believe in some magical being who listens to our prayers from up above and decides who gets hit with earthquakes and who gets cured from cancer, then I can only hope that your God given doubts will sweep away that idol and push you to find a deeper faith and a richer understanding not so easily undermined.  

Every now and again, we all belong in that metaphorical wilderness where our small certainties are stripped away and we have to face the wildness of newer, grander, more unsettling ideas.  This is the journey of faith-- it always passes through those wilderness places.  Do you doubt?  Listen to those doubts.  Treasure those doubts.  Let God use those doubts to reach deeper into your life and make you a more sacred vessel of God's love and truth.