Doubtful Disciples

It has been a while now since Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. According to Matthew, the risen Jesus is with the eleven disciples on a mountain in Galilee. He’s about to give them the Great Commission to make more disciples of all the nations. He’s about to trust the future of his church to these eleven men. And we are told that when the eleven disciples saw Jesus, they worshiped him, but some doubted.

Amazing! After all they had seen, some of Jesus’ disciples still had their doubts. They had seen him heal the sick, feed the hungry, and cast out demons. Now they were seeing him alive after having been killed on a cross and buried in a tomb. But some still doubted. Amazing. Although the text is typically translated, “some of them doubted,” it could also be translated, “they had some doubts.” So maybe this means there are few who had doubts about Jesus. Or maybe it means that they all had a few doubts. It’s amazing either way.

But it shouldn’t amaze me. I also have a few doubts. Some of you here today do as well. We too have seen an awful lot of Jesus’ faithfulness. We have more blessings than we can count. Jesus has saved our lives over and over. And yet, when faced with the questions or anxiety of today, we wonder if Jesus will save us again.

Some of us have intellectual doubts. The Bible creates a lot of questions for us. I learned this week that these questions start at an early age. The third grade Sunday School class came to visit me. They had some pretty tough issues they wanted to ask about. The first question I got was, “Where exactly is heaven?” Several wanted to know, “How do dinosaurs fit into the Bible?” I didn’t have very good answers. In time, their questions will become even more sophisticated as they wonder about other religions, other planets, other values, and the postmodern loss of values. Society does a good job of teaching people how to doubt.

Others of us find that our doubts are rooted more in emotional concerns. Nicholas Wolterstorff is a professor at Yale Divinity School who taught faith to others. Then his son was killed in a mountain climbing accident. And then he discovered his own faith was riddled with doubt. In writing about his grief he said, “My life has been divided into before and after. Never again will anyone inhabit the world the way he did. Only a hole remains, a void, a gap. My son is gone. The ache of the loss sinks down and down, deep beyond all telling. How deep do souls go?” When Wolterstorff comes to the New Testament texts that describe the resurrection of God’s son, he struggles to believe. He has his doubts. But he chooses to keep worshiping because he refuses to let death have the last word.

It is in that choice to worship that humanity reaches its most heroic moment. Because in the end, faith is not an intellectual struggle against skepticism, nor is it an emotional struggle against grief and heartache. In the end, faith is an act of the will, a choice to still come and bow down before Jesus. What is most amazing in this text, is that the disciples continued to worship Jesus in spite of their plaguing doubts.

It is also striking that Jesus does not condemn these men for their doubts, nor does he try to talk them out of their questions. According to the text, Jesus’ only response to their skepticism is to come to the disciples. There is a wonderful movement here, which is the movement that is replayed in every worship service of the church. We come to Jesus with our doubts, and he comes to us. As we behold him, we eventually lose sight of those doubts we brought along.

Worship is not about your doubts or your questions. Nor is it about your faith. In fact, it’s not about you at all. It’s not about the music you like. It’s not about the preacher. It’s not about whether or not you got anything out of the hour. It’s not about you! Worship is about the risen Savior Jesus Christ who comes to us.

Standing in the presence of the risen Christ does not remove your doubts. In fact, he gives you new things to doubt. As you keep worshiping Jesus Christ, you’ll start to doubt how seriously you should take the culture around you. You’ll doubt how seriously you should take yourself. And you’ll start to believe things you never thought you would believe.

Kathleen Norris has recently published a book titled, Amazing Grace. Frankly, the book is a little uneven, but it certainly has good moments, like when she is describing a heated exchange between a seminary student and an Orthodox theologian. The theologian had just finished his lecture on the development of the Church’s Creeds. The student asked, “What can one do when one finds it impossible to affirm certain tenets of the creed?” The Orthodox priest responded, “Well, you just say it. It’s not hard to master. With a little effort most learn it by heart.” Thinking he had been misunderstood, the student tried again, “What am I to do when I have difficulty affirming parts of the creed like the Virgin Birth?” He got the same response. “You just say it. Particularly when you have difficulty believing it, you just keep saying it. It will come to you eventually.” The student raised his voice. “How can I with integrity affirm a creed which I do not believe?” The priest responded, “It’s not your creed. It’s our creed. It belongs to the Body of Christ. We say it not because we are certain of it, but because Christ is.”

Nothing could be further from the experience of contemporary culture than to commit yourself to something that does not well up from your heart. Why do we invite you to repeat the Creed Sunday after Sunday? Why don’t we all stand up and say whatever we are feeling in worship. One person could say, “I’m feeling self-actualized today.” At the same time another says, “My parents weren’t very nice to me.” Somebody else could be saying, “I doubt next week is going to be better” At least that would be relevant. But the goal of worship is not to make it relevant to you. The goal of worship is to make you relevant to the story of Christ’s salvation that began before you and I started having doubts and feelings.

After Jesus came to the wavering, worshiping disciples, he said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” There it is again. The authority is not my experiences, not my doubts, and not my certainty. The authority is Jesus Christ. When we are afraid, we trust in his courage. When we have doubts, we trust in his certainty. When we are lost, we trust that he alone can bring us home to the Father, as he can our broken world.

“Go, therefore,” Jesus said, “and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the close of the age.”

This is the final movement of this great passage of the Bible. First, we come to Jesus as doubting disciples who choose to worship. Then he comes to us revealing his great authority in our lives. Thirdly, we go back out into all the world making others disciples of this great Savior.

It is always this third movement, that we have had the hardest time with. We don’t want to impose our beliefs on others. We want to be sensitive listeners and learners who respect diversity. Well, diversity is a great thing, but all of us share some common needs that lie beneath the things that distinguish us. It is to these common core issues that the gospel of Jesus Christ speaks. Is a physician being sensitive when he or she thinks, “Well, I don’t want to tell this patient that he has a disease. I need to honor his rights to be sick. The world needs sick people. It adds to the diversity.” No, the caring thing is when the doctor asserts with some authority, “I know how to make you better.”

“Pastor, are you saying that those outside of the church are spiritually sick?” Yes. But I am also saying that those inside the church are just as sick. We all suffer from the same common disease. The disease is called sin. It doesn’t matter if you are Christian, Buddist, Hindu, Muslim, or Atheist. The disease will eat away at your soul until you learn to confess it and find healing.

Evangelism is one sick person telling another sick person, “I know one who has the authority to make us better.” We are not the physician of the soul. We don’t have the authority to heal. Our authority is simply to tell others what we have found at the feet of Jesus Christ.

Today is Pentecost, the day we remember when the Holy Spirit descended upon the frightened doubting disciples and pushed them out into the world with Christ’s command to “Go!” You see, Christ didn’t just leave the future of the church in the hands of us disciples. More importantly, he also left it in the hands of the Spirit. For the last 2,000 years everything good that has happened in the church has happened only under the Spirit’s power.

If you are having trouble believing, only the Spirit can give you faith. You can’t muster it up. If you are having trouble seeing Christ in worship, only the Spirit can open your eyes to see that Jesus has come for you. If you are having trouble going into your part of the world with this hopeful, healing message, only the Spirit can give you the power to speak up.

And the best news of Pentecost is that the Holy Spirit will do all of those things for you. It doesn’t really matter if you want that, any more than it did for the timid disciples hiding in the upper room. It doesn’t really matter how many doubts or how much fear you may have. The Creed tells us that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. Not from you or me. So the Spirit will do what only God can do—change us from doubtful disciples into people of vision.

There is no question of that. The question is will we keep worshiping at the feet of Jesus, until the Spirit transforms us into men and women who can change the world?

This sermon first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 5, No. 4 (Jul/Aug 1999).