Letting Go of Doubt: Lessons from a Mountaintop
On the second Sunday in Lent, the church I serve continued our series focused on “Letting Go.” As we are journeying through this season together in a world that seems to be telling us to hold on tighter and tighter for dear life in order to survive, we are looking at how we, as people of faith, might find it helpful to try letting go of some things that may not be serving us well in this life of discipleship. On Sunday, we looked at letting go of doubt.
This past week was spring break for students here in Memphis, and my family decided it was finally time to try a ski trip. We headed to Utah, with 4 out of 5 of us attempting this winter sport for the very first time (yes, I am the one who has skied quite a bit in my life thanks to my college years in Colorado). So, I’m not going to sugarcoat this…the first day was a little rough. Phil and the girls found the skis to be quite awkward, which, let’s face it, they are. The girls were crashing down the hill, and there were some tears. Phil got nicknamed “stork legs” by our instructor because of his unwillingness to bed his knees.
Then, it happened. One of the girls figured it out. Our middle child. It clicked and soon she was sailing down the hill with a graceful stop at the bottom. She was the first to graduate to the chairlift and with a big, toothless smile, she was on her way, gliding down the mountain. Now, as you can maybe imagine, being surpassed by her younger sister did not sit well with my oldest child, who also happens to be my most sensitive child. With tears on her cheeks, I heard the words, “It’s not fair. I can’t do it. I am trying but I will never be able to do it. You told me this would be fun but I will never be able to ski.”
Jumping forward, my oldest did figure it out on day 2, and the youngest on day 3. My spouse learned to bend his knees, and we spent all of day 4, our last day, skiing together as a family. Everyone figured it out, just not at the same time. And there was no way to predict when the concept of skiing was going to click for each member of our family. We had no way of knowing whose brains and bodies were going to work together to accomplish this concept of controlled gliding down a hill on these two elongated things strapped to our feet. Everyone got there, but it took perseverance, faith, disappointment and even getting a little battered and bruised to make it happen.
As I have been marinating on this concept of “doubt” over the past several weeks in preparation for this message today, it has been impossible for me to not see this notion of doubt appear in the faces of my family members learning to ski. I can assure you that every single one of them doubted, at one point or another, whether they would be successful in skiing this past week. I found myself thinking back to the lectionary text for this Sunday, from the Book of Genesis, where God reminds Abram of their covenant together.
In true “God Story” fashion, God has chosen a most unlikely couple with whom to make a covenant. Abram and Sarah are an aging and childless couple, and yet God says that these two will become the ones whose offspring will outnumber the stars. But then time passes, and it hasn’t happened. They don’t have any offspring. More time passes. Nothing. Abram is beginning to doubt that he has understood the promises of God. But in our passage today, God breaks the silent waiting, saying, “Do not be afraid.” The words “Do not be afraid” (al-tira’ in Hebrew) carry meaning, and that meaning is, “You are about to hear good news.” Throughout the Hebrew Bible and into the New Testament, when a message from God opens with “Do not be afraid,” it means that good news is about to be heard. (On the flip side, when a message from God opens with “woe,” then take cover, the news is not going to be good for the recipient). God once again tells Abram that he will have an heir and that his descendants will outnumber the stars. God is gently reminding Abram to have faith, to trust the covenant that God has made.
One of the hardest elements of faith is remembering that God’s time is not our time. Like a child looking at me through tears asking why they haven’t yet figured out how to ski when I promised that skiing would be fun, so often our prayers and pleas to God have to do with timing. If God has promised us something, where is it? If God is listening, why isn’t God responding now in a way that I can see and understand? If God is present, where? If God can act, why isn’t God doing something now? If God hears my prayers, where is my response?
The question of God’s timing is one that humans are always struggling with. We want things to happen in our time. And it is humbling and frustrating to remember that just like in so many accounts in the Bible, God’s time is not our time, and our problems of timing are not God’s problems of timing.
We are living in a moment of great anxiety. In some ways, every day feels like a crisis. We have problems in our marriages, in our families, in our city, in our state, in our nation, in our world – all of which feel excessively urgent. Our political climate feels like we are sitting on the precipice of disaster. To read the news, any news source, regardless of which slant it takes, you come away with the anxiety of watching a countdown to some unknown but impending doom. This feels like a moment where people of faith cry out, “Where is God?” If we are people who believe that, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” then where is this kingdom? Because this sure doesn’t feel like any Kingdom of God?!
Like Abram, we feel like saying, “Um, hello? God?? Didn’t you say this would go differently? Didn’t you proclaim Good News of liberation from evil, oppression and death? Because we’re kind of seeing a lot of evil, oppression and death when we look around.” Yet, the story of God told over thousands of years in scripture reminds us that God’s time is not our time. The story of God reminds us that God is at work, sometimes at center stage, but even more often behind the scenes – present and working in ways that we cannot see, know or even comprehend at a particular moment.
There are a few sayings that I cling to when I find myself in the position of Abram, tapping my toe and pointing to my watch and thinking that God has forgotten about us. One saying goes, “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” Some attribute this quote to John Lennon but others say it’s far older and unattributed. I think this quote points to what we know to be true about how timing works in the story of God. In scripture we see time and again that everything will be okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it’s not the end, so just keep reading a little more and you will see how things turn around.
The second quote I turn to in moments like these is from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and it says, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” This quote reminds us that we will find ourselves in moments where we feel God has forgotten us. We will have those moments when doubt creeps because nothing seems to be going the way it should go. In our lifetimes we will see moments where evil triumphs over good, and when we doubt that goodness, justice, mercy and kindness will ever win again. The power in this quote by MLK is that it begins with two words – “I believe.” I believe.
As believers in the story of God, we are called, challenged even, to let go of our doubt. It’s an ongoing call and challenge, because doubt will creep in again and again when the timing of God and our own expectations of timing will inevitably be misaligned. You remember the old joke that says, “God grant me patience, and grant it to me now!?” It’s funny, because it’s true. Most humans are not known for their excessive patience. And yet patience is an essential ingredient in the recipe for faith, particularly faith during troubling times.
The faithful will wait on God’s timing, because they have faith that the Story of God is always one of triumphant Good News. In a world that seems to be piling more and more on all of our shoulders, consider letting go during this Lenten pilgrimage. Let’s start with letting go of doubt – that feeling that can weigh us down like an anchor and make us second guess whether God is at work in this world. Never doubt that in this moment, we are a part of God’s unfolding story, and that story is always one that ultimately concludes with Good News and Redemption.
Let go of your doubt. And all of God’s people who could said, Amen.
