Sunday, June 11, 2006
Of Things Divine: And They Doubted, Most Holy Trinity-B
Has faith ever prompted you to act beyond your doubts?
For a year beginning in the summer of 1978 as I prepared to leave for the seminary, I was filled with many doubts. I asked myself questions such as “Am I doing the right things?,” “Will my business sell?,” “What if it doesn’t work out?,” Am I doing God’s will or mine?” It was a time in my life I had to rely on my faith that I was answering a call from God to act beyond my doubts.
Now, in recent weeks I have had doubts about my recently announced change of assignments. These doubts are not about the assignment but whether I will be effective our not, will I “fit in” to a new parish community after having come to love this one so very much. Again, I have to allow my faith in God’s wisdom and my vow of obedience to take me beyond my doubts.
Have you ever found yourself in such a predicament? I’ll bet you have.
Certain verses in scripture make our hearts leap up and stand at attention, though perhaps for different reasons. Sometimes we are attracted to the excitement in the exclamations: “Let there be light!” “A child is born for us!” “He is risen; he is not here!” Other lines thrill us with their mystery: “I shall let my beauty pass before you, but my face you cannot see.” “His face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light.” Sometimes it’s the questions that move us, because they are also our questions: “Lord, will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty?” “How long, Lord, will you hide your face from me?” “Lord, to whom can we go?” But often it’s the humanity of the statements in a holy text that astonish us with their bald honesty: “Cursed be the day that I was born!” Or the ache in the brevity: “And Jesus wept.”
One verse that always gets my attention is this funny sentence near the end of Matthew’s gospel proclaimed today: “When they all saw Jesus, they worshiped, but they doubted.” It’s inelegant, awkward, and comical in its contradictions. But it offers a most comforting and endearing image of what discipleship looks like under even the best possible conditions. In the midst of an act of worship, the 11 closest friends Jesus ever had doubted him. And this is after three years of teaching, healing, miracles, crucifixion, and resurrection. This isn’t the Thomas situation, let’s be clear: It’s not hearsay about the risen Lord that these men doubt. Christ the Lord is standing right in front of them, right before their eyes. And they worship him. And they doubt. Such is the richness of our humanity!
It reminds me of the classic Sherlock Holmes statement about “the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.” As Watson points out, the dog did nothing in the nighttime. “That was the curious incident,” Holmes assures him. When intruders enter, dogs are expected to bark. And when miraculous events break into mundane history, one expects a certain wholehearted cascade into faith. Shouldn’t the 11 remaining apostles be levitating with Easter certitude? Shouldn’t they be standing on the mountaintop with Jesus halfway to transfiguration themselves in the presence of his risen glory?
Evidently faith doesn’t work that way. Jesus explored this curious reality in his story about Lazarus and the rich man. When both die and enter their eternal destinies, the rich man pleads with Father Abraham to allow Lazarus to return to earth to warn his brothers. Abraham refuses, regretting that those who doubt continue to do so even if one should rise from the dead. The disciples reserve a corner of doubt in the dynamic exercising of their faith. They have rushed to Galilee to meet Jesus, even as they doubt the likelihood of such an encounter. They bow reverently, all the while disbelieving their own experience.
And we know what this is. We call it “hoping against hope.” When we find our emotions at war with reason, we enter into a comic bargain with ourselves, agreeing to disagree with reasonable expectations. We want what cannot be. All right then; we acknowledge the futility of our longing and continue to want it. In a sense, this is the only real definition of faith, to long for what cannot logically be. If something is obviously and inevitably coming our way, it doesn’t take faith to wait for it, just patience. Faith, as the Letter to the Hebrews notes, is the evidence of things hoped for and not seen. It is reaching for the improbable and then graduating to the impossible. If resurrection from the dead and virgin birth and miraculous healing were rationally comprehensible events, we wouldn’t have to believe them. We’d just read about them in the Commercial-Appeal. (And we all believe everything we read in the Commercial-Appeal.)
Moses makes a curious argument in the first reading today by enjoining the people to pledge themselves to the one, true God. Moses appeals to God’s singularity: not just that God is “one,” but that God is unique. What Israel’s God does, no other god can do. Their God not only made the world but makes history with every act of divine will – from the creation of everything out of nothing right down to His will for each of us to come into being.
We’re with Moses on this one. Our God is a singular God whose signature act, from the Christian perspective, is not the creation or even the resurrection but the Incarnation: the Word Made Flesh, God becoming one of us so that we might share in His divinity. That is why we bow at our profession of faith in the Incarnation while reciting the creed. Without the Incarnation our salvation would have been impossible. And our Eucharist is an invitation to that shared life with God. The indwelling Spirit is one more sign of that incorporation. God is in us by virtue of the infusion of God’s own life through the gift of sanctifying grace in Baptism, and we are in God if we love God and neighbor with the same divine love that first loved us. We believe this. Fervently we believe this. And, we doubt this. Routinely we doubt the existence of God, the Trinitarian formula, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and so on. And so, we live in the comic style of the Keystone Cops, thwarting ourselves at every turn, running in circles between the altar and the confessional, between giving thanks to God for His blessings and giving an account of our sorry selves who forgot that we love God first and neighbor second every time we commit a self-indulgent offense against God or neighbor.
It’s ironic to consider on the solemnity of the Trinity that God is a perfectly integrated One-in-Three when we can barely keep our singular selves together in one place for a quarter of an hour because we have been trained to live our lives in seven-minute segments marked by commercials for self-indulgence. The integrity of the divine will is mutually shared by Father, Son, and Spirit. The human will of a single individual is like a Jackson Pollack painting: a little here, a little there, and a spit in the middle until it’s a dense tangle of conflict masquerading as harmony.
Jesus hands over the Great Commission in one smooth sentence: “Go, make disciples, baptize, and teach.” We’d like to think the Apostles might have been finished with their doubting when they received this huge lump of responsibility, but chances are they weren’t. So now they carry the double burden of presenting the gospel to the whole world and having private reservations about the whole experience.
Thankfully, Jesus doesn’t just hand off the mission. He also adds one much appreciated final clause: “And behold, I am with you always.” Jesus knows that our divided nature is not going to go away. We’ll keep on dragging our doubts into our worship like Bob Marley’s chains in the Charles Dickens classic Christmas tale. But happily, the reverse is true, and we can take divine comfort in knowing that wherever doubt takes us, our faith won’t be far behind.
For a year beginning in the summer of 1978 as I prepared to leave for the seminary, I was filled with many doubts. I asked myself questions such as “Am I doing the right things?,” “Will my business sell?,” “What if it doesn’t work out?,” Am I doing God’s will or mine?” It was a time in my life I had to rely on my faith that I was answering a call from God to act beyond my doubts.
Now, in recent weeks I have had doubts about my recently announced change of assignments. These doubts are not about the assignment but whether I will be effective our not, will I “fit in” to a new parish community after having come to love this one so very much. Again, I have to allow my faith in God’s wisdom and my vow of obedience to take me beyond my doubts.
Have you ever found yourself in such a predicament? I’ll bet you have.
Certain verses in scripture make our hearts leap up and stand at attention, though perhaps for different reasons. Sometimes we are attracted to the excitement in the exclamations: “Let there be light!” “A child is born for us!” “He is risen; he is not here!” Other lines thrill us with their mystery: “I shall let my beauty pass before you, but my face you cannot see.” “His face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light.” Sometimes it’s the questions that move us, because they are also our questions: “Lord, will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty?” “How long, Lord, will you hide your face from me?” “Lord, to whom can we go?” But often it’s the humanity of the statements in a holy text that astonish us with their bald honesty: “Cursed be the day that I was born!” Or the ache in the brevity: “And Jesus wept.”
One verse that always gets my attention is this funny sentence near the end of Matthew’s gospel proclaimed today: “When they all saw Jesus, they worshiped, but they doubted.” It’s inelegant, awkward, and comical in its contradictions. But it offers a most comforting and endearing image of what discipleship looks like under even the best possible conditions. In the midst of an act of worship, the 11 closest friends Jesus ever had doubted him. And this is after three years of teaching, healing, miracles, crucifixion, and resurrection. This isn’t the Thomas situation, let’s be clear: It’s not hearsay about the risen Lord that these men doubt. Christ the Lord is standing right in front of them, right before their eyes. And they worship him. And they doubt. Such is the richness of our humanity!
It reminds me of the classic Sherlock Holmes statement about “the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.” As Watson points out, the dog did nothing in the nighttime. “That was the curious incident,” Holmes assures him. When intruders enter, dogs are expected to bark. And when miraculous events break into mundane history, one expects a certain wholehearted cascade into faith. Shouldn’t the 11 remaining apostles be levitating with Easter certitude? Shouldn’t they be standing on the mountaintop with Jesus halfway to transfiguration themselves in the presence of his risen glory?
Evidently faith doesn’t work that way. Jesus explored this curious reality in his story about Lazarus and the rich man. When both die and enter their eternal destinies, the rich man pleads with Father Abraham to allow Lazarus to return to earth to warn his brothers. Abraham refuses, regretting that those who doubt continue to do so even if one should rise from the dead. The disciples reserve a corner of doubt in the dynamic exercising of their faith. They have rushed to Galilee to meet Jesus, even as they doubt the likelihood of such an encounter. They bow reverently, all the while disbelieving their own experience.
And we know what this is. We call it “hoping against hope.” When we find our emotions at war with reason, we enter into a comic bargain with ourselves, agreeing to disagree with reasonable expectations. We want what cannot be. All right then; we acknowledge the futility of our longing and continue to want it. In a sense, this is the only real definition of faith, to long for what cannot logically be. If something is obviously and inevitably coming our way, it doesn’t take faith to wait for it, just patience. Faith, as the Letter to the Hebrews notes, is the evidence of things hoped for and not seen. It is reaching for the improbable and then graduating to the impossible. If resurrection from the dead and virgin birth and miraculous healing were rationally comprehensible events, we wouldn’t have to believe them. We’d just read about them in the Commercial-Appeal. (And we all believe everything we read in the Commercial-Appeal.)
Moses makes a curious argument in the first reading today by enjoining the people to pledge themselves to the one, true God. Moses appeals to God’s singularity: not just that God is “one,” but that God is unique. What Israel’s God does, no other god can do. Their God not only made the world but makes history with every act of divine will – from the creation of everything out of nothing right down to His will for each of us to come into being.
We’re with Moses on this one. Our God is a singular God whose signature act, from the Christian perspective, is not the creation or even the resurrection but the Incarnation: the Word Made Flesh, God becoming one of us so that we might share in His divinity. That is why we bow at our profession of faith in the Incarnation while reciting the creed. Without the Incarnation our salvation would have been impossible. And our Eucharist is an invitation to that shared life with God. The indwelling Spirit is one more sign of that incorporation. God is in us by virtue of the infusion of God’s own life through the gift of sanctifying grace in Baptism, and we are in God if we love God and neighbor with the same divine love that first loved us. We believe this. Fervently we believe this. And, we doubt this. Routinely we doubt the existence of God, the Trinitarian formula, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and so on. And so, we live in the comic style of the Keystone Cops, thwarting ourselves at every turn, running in circles between the altar and the confessional, between giving thanks to God for His blessings and giving an account of our sorry selves who forgot that we love God first and neighbor second every time we commit a self-indulgent offense against God or neighbor.
It’s ironic to consider on the solemnity of the Trinity that God is a perfectly integrated One-in-Three when we can barely keep our singular selves together in one place for a quarter of an hour because we have been trained to live our lives in seven-minute segments marked by commercials for self-indulgence. The integrity of the divine will is mutually shared by Father, Son, and Spirit. The human will of a single individual is like a Jackson Pollack painting: a little here, a little there, and a spit in the middle until it’s a dense tangle of conflict masquerading as harmony.
Jesus hands over the Great Commission in one smooth sentence: “Go, make disciples, baptize, and teach.” We’d like to think the Apostles might have been finished with their doubting when they received this huge lump of responsibility, but chances are they weren’t. So now they carry the double burden of presenting the gospel to the whole world and having private reservations about the whole experience.
Thankfully, Jesus doesn’t just hand off the mission. He also adds one much appreciated final clause: “And behold, I am with you always.” Jesus knows that our divided nature is not going to go away. We’ll keep on dragging our doubts into our worship like Bob Marley’s chains in the Charles Dickens classic Christmas tale. But happily, the reverse is true, and we can take divine comfort in knowing that wherever doubt takes us, our faith won’t be far behind.
