Easter 2

A Sunday school teacher was telling the story of Sodom’s destruction to her young students. She related, “God looked down on Sodom and saw it was a terrible place, full of bad people. Before he destroyed it, though, he looked hard for 10 good men. But all God could find was one good man, whose name was Lot. God sent an angel to Lot then, who told him, ‘The city is going to be destroyed! Take your wife and flee out of the city!’ So Lot did, but as they were leaving, his wife looked behind her – and poof, she was turned into a pillar of salt. All right class, any questions?”

One little girl raised her hand and with a troubled face asked, “If the angel told Lot to take his wife and flea out of the city – what happened to the flea?”

David Harum, a character in Edward Westcott’s book, David Harum: A Story of American Life (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1898) claimed that “A reasonable amount o’ fleas is good fer a dog – keeps him from broodin’ over bein’ a dog” (284). In that same vein, Sir Francis Galton, an English scientist of the 19th century, wrote, “Well-washed and well-combed domestic dogs grow dull; they miss the stimulus of fleas.”

Obviously, the flea-carried quality being lauded here is that tiny creature’s ability to take its otherwise self-satisfied, snoozing host and irritate it to attention. We all need fleas of that sort: small outside agitators that keep us from becoming predictable, complacent and plodding.

We need “fleas” to nip at our conscience, to irritate our assumptions, to disturb our expectations. One of the primary areas of our lives that should be well-infested with bothersome bugs is our faith. Too often we are content to let our faith become a matter of Sunday morning services. For the balance of the week, the rest of our energies dissolve into job deadlines, kids’ schedules, household demands and an occasional peace-keeping mission within one of these territories. Why then do we need the annoyance of fleas?

Fleas in our faith, or the “ants in the pants of faith” (as Frederick Buechner calls doubts) are the itches and twitches that keep our faith awake and moving. God’s most faithful servants have usually also been among the most doubtful.

Abraham was incredulous and Sarah hysterical with doubt when God promised them a son in their old age. Jonah’s faith was so doubt-infested that he tried to run away from his mission to Nineveh. Jesus’ disciples were constantly doubting. Despite the fact that they were witnesses to the remarkable powers Jesus commanded, they still panicked and screamed at him, “Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” (Mark 4: 38) when Jesus was peacefully napping through a storm at sea.

Luke records that after the resurrection these same disciples “disbelieved for joy and wonder” (Luke 24:41). Jesus himself, the incarnation of faithfulness, cried out on the cross in doubt, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46).

It is exactly because Jesus provides us with the greatest example of faith that this flea of doubt must be present and nipping at his love for God. It has been well said, a faith that does not doubt is a dead faith. The mark of great faith is a great and continuous struggle to get it, keep it, and share it. The early church found power and comfort in the image of a doubt-riddled Jesus praying in the Gethsemane Garden for the cup to pass from him.

You might say that faith without doubt is dead; but doubt without faith is death. Doubt that is not grounded in an ultimate confidence in the Cross of Christ is doomed to skepticism, cynicism and despair, for it cannot see that in the loss of our certainties there is given to us the greater certainty of God’s redemptive presence. It cannot see that, through doubt, we are delivered from the great lie that we are gods and our truths are eternal truth and our standards timelessly valid. But where doubt is rooted in faith, it becomes the source of honesty, humility and joy.

One of the ancient church’s legends teaches that doubt increases in power as saints of God increase in saintliness. Dostoyevsky, who privately suspected that doubt was an angel and not a devil, wrote powerfully how “My hosannas have been forged in the crucible of doubt.”

True doubts grow naturally out of true faith. God, the focus of our faithfulness, can never be unequivocally proved. Theologian Richard John Neuhaus correctly points out that we use “the term ‘believer’ to describe a person who is persuaded of the reality of God. The alternative to being a believer, of course, is to be a knower” (Richard John Neuhaus, “Can Atheists Be Good Citizens?” First Things 15 [August/September 1991], 17).

Immanuel Kant warned that doubt is a place of rest, not a place of residence. Doubt calls us to action, not just to agitation. There’s a difference between doubting and disenchantment, between wrestling with faith and flinging faith to the winds. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, in his Eighteen Rules for thinking in the church, had this as his 13th: “To arrive at the truth in all things, we ought always to be ready to believe that what I see as white is black if the church so defines it.”

Doubting here is more a warning against equivocation, against wavering in loyalty, against a lack of a core commitment that may cause indecision over whether our ultimate allegiance goes to God or to mammon.

Don’t suppress or repress your honest doubts. Thomas voiced his serious doubts about Jesus’ miraculous return. But he also continued to remain in the midst of the company of the disciples. When Jesus healed the demon-possessed child in Mark 9:24, the overjoyed father exclaimed, “I believe, help my unbelief.”

The 17^th-century English philosopher Francis Bacon noted that “If a man will begin in certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”

Faith lives hand in hand with doubt by continuing to worship God, by continuing to pray to God, despite doubt’s presence.

So, don’t let your doubts plug up the channels to the Almighty. Pray to God, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.” Do like Thomas. In the midst of doubt, reach out and touch somebody’s hand, and be amazed at the presence of God you find in that palm.

John’s Gospel identifies Thomas as “the twin.” Thomas’ twin is found in each of us – if we are truly faithful. Find out for yourself just how right Saint Augustine was when he declared, “A man doubts, therefore God is.”