Faith, hope & doubt

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.” Hebrew 1.1

A little boy asked ‘what is faith?’
He thinks awhile and then says: ‘Believing what we know can’t be true!’

Today’s readings are about faith – especially the epistle. Most of us find the opening verse a tall order: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”

I left my old college 35 years ago. I was young and very certain of what I believed and of what I knew, but rather uncertain of who I was. Thirty five years on, I’m much more confident about who I am (and who I am not), but far less certain about what I know.

So today, I want us to think about faith, but by considering one of the Bible’s most famous doubters – who yet believed. He is always remembered as ‘doubting’ Thomas.

This is a little unfair. We don't remember ‘denying’ Peter; nor the beloved disciple, ‘streaker’ John.

And it’s unfair because we ALL doubt. And I don’t mean thoroughgoing scepticism - doubting everything as a view of life. (parachutist - cup of tea joke)

And I don’t mean unbelief - believing or not believing is an informed decision of the will. I mean, just letting hard questions float around in our mind.

Questions like: “Is God really there or have I just fooled myself?”
Questions like: “Why do such bad things often happen to good people?”
Questions like: “Am I really called to be a priest?”

And a host of others, particular to you. Why do we doubt? What’s behind it?

Sin - distrusting God is at the root of many of the problems of our human condition. Questioning is not a sin - distrust of God is - it’s the ancient sin of Adam and Eve. As long as we struggle with sin - and we will always struggle with sin - we will struggle with the doubt of whether God is really good.

To compensate for this we will often fall into another sin - the sin of certainty. For the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. It is our doubts that unite us. Our convictions divide us.

Which of course doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have convictions - but it does mean you should hold them with a degree of humility. We all know the sort of person for whom there are only two positions on all subjects - theirs, and the wrong one.

Listen to Luther’s ‘doubter’s’ prayer:

“Dear Lord,
Although I am sure of my position,
I am unable to sustain it without thee.
Help me, or I am lost.”

And here we acknowledge another factor leading to doubt: human frailty - our limitations in grasping the infinite. And our temptation to think we know it all. Job and Ecclesiastes and good St Thomas remind us of this.

Until like Thomas we meet the risen Christ face to face, (and we won’t do that until we pass through the gate of death) we will always be those who walk by faith, and not by sight. We will always need to keep on believing, despite the doubts. “Happy are those who have not seen me” says Jesus “ and yet believe”.

Tennyson put it rather well in The Ancient Sage:

For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven: wherefore be thou wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt.

And that brings us on to another factor in doubt: personality - some Christians find it very hard to ‘cleave to the sunnier side of doubt’. They are by nature prone to look on the gloomier side of most things. They lie awake at night worrying about everything.

Like the man who wrote to the Tax Office:

I can't sleep at night because I've cheated on my taxes. I enclose a £1,000. If I still can't sleep, I'll send the other £1,000.

I’ve never spent a lot of my time absorbed in metaphysical angst. But I have friends who are constantly plagued by stuff that goes on in their head. St Thomas may have been such a man.

That sometimes tormented priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, pleads with himself in one of his poems:

My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.…

Soul, self; come poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile.…

And how do we call off thoughts awhile?

Luke gives us another reason for Thomas’s doubt, indeed the doubt of all the disciples, and all us who have followed them.

“... they still did not believe it because of joy and amazement…” (Lk 24.41)

At the heart of our faith is something almost too incredible to believe. Thomas dared not believe it.

And every time we consider the risen Christ, it’s as if Jesus says to us again: “See my hands... my side; stop doubting and believe.”

This is the mystery of faith:
Christ has died
Christ is risen
Christ will come again.

The late John Betjeman, a former poet laureate, reflecting on the mystery of Christmas, clung on to that faith, although he hardly dared to believe it:

And is it true? For if it is,
No loving fingers tying strings
Around those tissued fripperies,
The sweet and silly Christmas things...
Can with this single Truth compare -
That God was Man in Palestine
And lives today in Bread and Wine.

We always hold on to our faith, through doubt. It is the safe way to believe, and allows us to explore our faith with humility and confidence.

For we may not have certainty, for then we would not be walking by faith, but by sight; however, we can have proper confidence in the Gospel: we can enjoy God’s gift to all his children: assurance and personal conviction.

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen.” Hebrew 1.1