WHEN WE STUMBLE
Rev. Dr. Joyce Antila Phipps
Old First Church August 29, 2021
Texts: Psalm 49; Mark 9: 42-50
In Ingmar Berman's film Winter Light, a pastor of a small congregation in northern Sweden struggles with his own loss of faith. Finding himself unable to provide spiritual guidance to his congregants, he stumbles through his service in an almost mechanistic manner; he stumbles through his attempt to counsel a congregant's own spiritual torment which results in the congregant's suicide. Painfully, he asks, “Where is God in the midst of our suffering?” and, of course, in typical Bergman fashion, receives no answer. That pastor's stumbling and struggling with questions of faith is not much different from the questions we often have in the midst of our own personal trials.
Although personal crisis may be a cause of stumbling in faith, there is always an undercurrent of questioning. The writer Philip Yancey categorizes the line between faith and doubt as the question of whether we believe that the visible world is all that there is. That's certainly one aspect of the line, but rather than a line, the borderlands of faith are broader than a simple line.
As we examine the crux of our individual faiths and our common heritage, many questions arise that contribute to something less than a clear trajectory of faith and belief: personal events in our lives, the problem of evil in a world we were taught that is governed by a good and beneficent God, suffering, and finding purpose in our lives. All these are common and intersect our lives more often than we are willing to admit.
At first glance, the passage from Mark seems to say the opposite. It was composed in a time when the early Christian community was under immense pressure. Jerusalem had been destroyed as a result of the wars of 66-70 CE. Christians were no longer welcome in the synagogues; in fact, they had by that time pretty much separated themselves from Judaism and become a totally new religion. They had already been singled out by Nero several years before and they functioned in small cohesive bodies just in order to survive. This need was so intense that each of the Synoptic Gospels has some version of verses 42-43 although each was speaking to a different community.
The beauty of the Gospels can be found in how a statement written for one time and place can be applied to a different time and place, not to mention circumstances. The writer has Jesus saying that it would be better for a person who attempts to mislead “one of these little ones” – meaning believers not children – to have a millstone hung around their necks and be thrown into the sea. This is not a meek and mild Jesus, that's for sure!
The question for us today is what causes us to stumble, whether in faith or in our daily lives and how can we move beyond our doubts and into a stronger faith. It goes without saying, no thinking person just packs up doubts into a little box and puts them on a shelf; likewise, we cannot ignore the many serious issues we face in just living from day to day. That approach will only cause the issues to fester until they bubble over like a pot of boiling water. That means we have to face them, address them, and learn how to approach our living in ways that are constructive in the context of our faith.
But when our stumbling is in our faith, what then? Being honest with our questions and doubts rather than not facing them is critical in moving us beyond stumbling. I’m not saying that we get over our questions and doubts as if they are like colds, but that we learn how to live with them and beyond them. This sounds paradoxical but paradox is the context of our lives. What's important is that we know that we can ask uncomfortable questions in a supportive community.
Our questions may not have answers, at least answers that are common to us all. But in a community of trust and friendship, we are able to explore the borderlands of faith and belief. Just as courage has no meaning without fear, so faith has no real meaning without doubt. The community of love is there to catch us when we stumble and to help us stay on the road, on the journey.
One of the blessings of our heritage in this church is that wherever two or three or six or eight or more are gathered, there will be at least twice as many opinions as there are people in the room. And that is really healthy. That means we are exploring and searching, recognizing that diversity of opinion even in stumbling is our strength. The soul liberty and freedom of conscience espoused by the early Baptists caused a great deal of dissension, even division, but it was and still is essential to who we are.
Stumbling in faith or in life, is a painful process, one that forces us to confront the existential questions of our identity, how we perceive ourselves and how we want the world to perceive us. When we stumble the way we perceive ourselves is often not congruent with the way we want the world to perceive us. In fact, there is often a cognitive dissonance between the two. When we stumble, we usually do not want the world to know.
Part of bringing our outer selves and inner selves back into some form of congruence is by being able to say: Yes, this is where I am and that's just fine. But it's always easier said than done. We may not be able to say the words of the Psalmist: Why should I fear in times of trouble? That Psalm, of course, addresses – shall we say – issues of wealth inequality. But it speaks to something deeper, namely, the realization that, in the end, we are all equal in that we all die. Not exactly a cheery thought, but one that can help us keep things in perspective.
But that's the outer part. Let's go back to the inner part – the stumbling in our faith. The millstone here is the insistence that we do not question, that we do not address the serious issues we face in faith. We must ask the questions while living faithfully, just as we keep our commitments even when we get tired of them.
It's a bit like marriage. Any of us who have been married or who live with a partner know there are times when we just want to junk it all, but we stay in because we have made a commitment. In matters of faith, we continue to live faithfully – and for each of us, that means something different – while we explore, discuss, confront, tackle – use whatever word you want – the questions essential to our faith.
We are able to do this in a community that welcomes questioning and discussion, in a church that holds us in love even when we are not very loving ourselves. We hold each other up. That's what we do when we stumble. We hold each other up.
Let us pray: You who gave us minds to think and questions to ask, bless us in our journey as we share the love we find in you. In the name of him who calls us to question, even Christ Jesus our Lord, Amen.