Everybody Doubts

Everybody doubts. Pastors doubt. Bishops doubt.  People in the church pews and people who would never set foot in a church doubt. Everybody doubts...even Jesus.

That's the provocative argument that Peter Rollins makes in a book I read this summer called Insurrection. In this book, Pete flips the script on our notions of doubt and faith and says that, in fact, To Believe is Human. To Doubt, Divine. Pete says that usually we see doubt as a bad thing, evidence of a shaky or insufficient faith—evidence of our distance (a falling away) from God. Instead, he argues, that doubt is the very thing that draws us closer to God. How does that work? He points out two things: First, he writes about how Jesus himself doubted on the cross when he said, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" When we doubt and feel lost and forsaken, he says, we are close to Jesus and his own lament from the cross.

Second, he says that when we doubt, when we participate in this crucifixion event as Jesus did, what falls away is really a false sense of God. That is, an image of God that is going to somehow magically going to make everything turn out just right and everything is going to be okay and tied up in a neat bow. (Because if you're on the cross, well, that's really not an option.)

Instead, we are left with a God that walks with us through the worst and best that life brings. He says that this false sense of God falls away on the cross and we are left with a God that may not tie our lives up into a neat bow, but is there with us in the heartbreak, the challenges of life. And in those moments, brings us into new life, resurrection. And, "Resurrection life is not some turning away from the experience of death [or doubt] that we find in the event of Crucifixion but rather describes a way of living in the very midst and finding there a way of truly affirming life." "in the Resurrection, we discover that God remains dwelling in our very midst through the embrace of life." So, it turns out that doubt can actually bring us closer to God. Doubt is something God in Jesus has experienced. Our doubts expose our false sense of God. And lead us to the God who is profoundly present to us in our daily lives. And this piece reminded me of God on Tap: "This God is affirmed where people are gathered together in love and is testified to where the sick are healed, the starving fed, and where those who dwell in death are raised into life. 'Where two or three come together in my name,' we read in the Gospel according to Matthew, 'there I am with them.' In other words, where people are gathered together in love, God is present." I trust God will be present with us at our next God on Tap