Sermon : ‘Be Patient Toward Doubts’

What do you think about America’s involvement in Somalia? Are you for it or against it?

Last week, about 1,800 U.S. Marines began landing in Somalia, the advance guard of a United Nations force that will probably grow to 17 times that size. The hope is that the situation will soon be well in hand and the distribution of food to the starving will proceed.

Yet why did we go into Somalia? The mission is a striking departure for both the United Nations and the United States. It was mounted without invitation from the host government, since there is no Somali government. President Bush said that 1.5 million Somalis may starve to death because armed gangs have been stealing relief supplies and “only the U.S. has the global reach” to cope with the crisis.

While I am deeply concerned about Somalia, a similar situation exists in Mozambique and conditions are probably worse in the southern part of Sudan. While ultimately I would support, if not applaud, what our government has done, I do have some serious doubts about it. Yet, that’s all right, isn’t it? Can’t we have doubts about things we support or believe in?

Doubt certainly is no stranger to the Bible. In fact, today’s Scripture opens with a question that thinly veils a doubt. John the Baptist, who is in prison facing execution, sends his disciples to Jesus to ask, “Are you the Coming One or should we be looking for someone else?”

John had good reasons to doubt Jesus. If you think back to last week’s Scripture in Chapter 3 of Matthew, where John preaches a sermon about the coming Messiah, he describes a figure of power, a bringer of judgment, a carrier of fire who holds an ax in one hand to chop down the unfruitful trees and a shovel in the other hand to sift out the chaff in the grain.

From the very beginning of their relationship, Jesus was a little baffling to John, a little strange--less messianic than John had expected and less cataclysmic than John had preached. So many things Jesus did raised doubts for John. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught “with authority” but what Jesus taught seemed calculated more to put axes in the hands of his opponents than in the hands of his disciples.

Yet the most puzzling thing for John the Baptist must have been the fact that he, John, the propagandist of the New Order, was still in prison, and Herod, the embodiment of the oppressive Establishment, was still on the throne and about to have John’s head. Wasn’t the coming Messiah supposed to set the prisoners free?

Doubt is an important ingredient in a growing, dynamic relationship with God. Faith never becomes absolutely clear. There will always be a dimension of faith that will be obscure. There is no aspect of faith which is immune to doubt.

A few years ago, I was at the hospital with a family whose daughter was there for tests. I was with them because they feared the worst. As we waited, the mother turned to me and said, “I’m scared. I’m more scared than I have ever been in my life.” And then she began to cry.

I held her like I hold my children when they are afraid; and I heard myself saying to her, “Don’t be afraid. It’s all right.” Yet again, she said, “Something’s wrong. I know it. I’m scared. I’m really scared.”

As I sat there holding this woman, I was thinking to myself, “What’s all right? What am I promising her? I’m scared, too. Who knows what the neurologist will find. What’s all right? How can I tell her everything will be all right?”

But I did. I held her tightly; and again I said, “It’s all right. It’s all right.”

I meant those words. I don’t understand them, but I meant them. Perhaps one day I will find out what I mean when I say, “It will be all right.” Yet those words are implicit in everything I preach and teach to the congregation.

This morning, I beg you to be patient toward your doubts. While I don’t want you to wallow in them, I pray that you will love the questions themselves, and learn to live with them, if not celebrate them. As Rainer Maria Rilke says in the quotation at the beginning of the bulletin, if you “will live the questions now, perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”