Jun 5, 2020
“Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him, they worshiped him; but some doubted.” (Matthew 28:16–17, NRSV)
Trinity Part 4
“The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns.” Says the more or less conventional Christian writer Anne Lamott in her book “Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith.”
Even the some of the 11 disciples with the risen Jesus standing before them doubted. I have only had deep doubt a few times in my life, but I have little doubts often. I think that would be your experience too.
Our faith, our trust in God, as Christians is pegged out by the Bible. When President Trump stood in front of the church for a photo with a Bible, those Christians who like him, were pleased because he was affirming the Christian faith in a very public way using the book which “instructs us for salvation through faith in Jesus Christ.” (2 Tim 3:15) It really upset those who don’t like Mr Trump (including me) because we feel that his life and actions do not really reflect a genuine trust in the Jesus of the Bible.
The Bible is crucial and so is experience. If our experience is not consistent with the Bible, the Bible wins, but without the experience of faith, of meeting God, of having a sense of God’s presence – we have no faith. It is often where experience and the Bible clash that doubt arises and we struggle with both. My experience has always been that what Anne Lamott says is right, eventually “some light returns.” Elijah in despair and fear, meeting God in the “still small voice” is a Biblical example of this. (1 Kings 19:1-13)
I think we experience God in three main ways. Through meeting Jesus who is the Word and who speaks the words of God to us from the Bible. I think we also meet God as a kind of Sense of the Holy or the other, or the beyond, and we experience God within. Now this is not a full or proper doctrine of the Trinity, but Jesus is God who speaks to us through the word, the one who just like a printed Bible was someone we could touch and see; God as one of us. God the Father is most like that sense of God beyond and Holy, and the Spirit is the sense of God within. Like doubt I reckon you have had these types of meeting with God, and when doubt comes it is in those meetings and the struggle that sometimes goes with them that light returns.
God, when our hearts are darkened with doubt and fear, give us a sense of your presence, so that light may return. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.
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