Courage through Doubt and Moral Disgust

Earlier this year a young man showed up at the church during my office hours to talk about his, as he called it, crumbling faith. He asked me: “how can I, how can anyone believe in the Christian God, when the greatest claim is that God is love and Christians have spent thousands of years killing, imprisoning, torturing, burning, forcibly converting, demeaning and belittling people who they think don’t follow their version (a contested version even among Christians) this God who is love.” 

I asked him: “what is it that you’re looking for when you’re evaluating the claims of Scripture about who God is?” He replied, “that they are true.” “how would you know they’re true,” I asked. He said, “there should be evidence in how Scripture aligns with what we see happen in the world for those who proclaim Christian faith.” For example, all of my family is Christian; they were baptized, went through catechism, go to church every Sunday; they take communion, Jesus’s own body and blood (he is Catholic). And yet they support political figures who do the opposite of what Jesus says, “feed the poor, clothe the poor, provide medical aid to the poor, to the stranger, to the outcast, to the foreigner, to anyone, anywhere who has need; do not kill, yet they kill in preemptive wars.”

Then he said, “But Scripture tells us that Jesus says, “those who love me will follow my commandments.” Those who love me will be obedient in following the Commandments not because of their own will, but because Jesus will give them his Holy Spirit, God the Holy Spirit, to dwell within them so they can participate in God’s own divine love and therefore be obedient to God’s will, which is that thou shalt not kill. And yet, they, along with so many other Christians, support and even advocate killing others. So this leaves two options: God is impotent to effect the change he says he will in people; or God doesn’t exist. The idea of God is just a placebo that we use to make ourselves feel better about a world that feels out of control, that angers or frightens us. And we use the idea of God to justify whatever means we use to get the end that we desire: demeaning people, excluding, withdrawing legal protections, taunting, persecuting, arresting and yeah, killing, all in the name of God. 

I commended him for properly understanding what we hear in our Gospel lesson this morning: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” Love is not an emotion but a whole life of actions that obey God’s calling and direction to us. That obedience is the evidence of God’s love for us. It’s something that we receive from God who joins us to himself, sending us the Holy Spirit who is the love between Father and Son; dwelling in us so that we might be drawn into the divine love between the Father and Son; allowing us to participate in God’s own being.” 

“So you’re right on the one hand,” I said to him, we should expect to see believers who love not just their neighbour, but their enemy too; we should expect to see believers who take care of the sick and poor, the refugee, the immigrant, the foreigner, the outcast; and we should expect believers not to kill, or to support preemptive killing. “On the other hand,” I said, “One of our greatest Apostles whom Jesus commissioned while he was in the middle of persecuting and killing Christians, was Saul, or Paul; who, even after his conversion, would go on to say this: “the good that I want to do I do not do, but the evil that I do not want to do, that is what I do. I’m at the end of my rope with trying to do good; I just can’t do it. What can I do. Thanks be to God that in Christ, I am not left on my own.” 

You see, one of the things that Paul recognizes is his ability to know God fully - that is - to understand, make sense of, and to know in every circumstance, how to respond, well, it’s very partial; we see now through a glass darkly he says. It’s tough to trust and hold fast, to give up those things we think kept us safe, in control, and powerful, when we cannot see God perfectly in every moment of our lives. So Paul’s constantly falling back into his old ways of seeing and evaluating the world and the place of other people and of himself in this new world into which God has called him.  

One of the things we know Paul is in the midst of doing while struggling to do God’s commandments - struggling and apparently often failing - is writing to churches all across the Holy lands. He’s often writing from prison, or while travelling; he’s writing to commend, to chastise, to correct, to provide direction and discipline. And we have the fruits of his labour: letters that have helped all of us navigate our faith as individuals and as churches across the ages. Paul’s whole life - the good, the evil, getting it right, getting it wrong, asking to have his thorn removed but having to endure it, not being sure about this or that, the very struggle to do good, to love as he was loved by Christ - reminds us of a central reality: try as we might, like those who have come before us and like our enemies, we, you and I, are going to fail to meet God’s standard of perfect love. 

So then thanks be to God that through Jesus we are sent an advocate, the Holy Spirit, to dwell within us, to make God present within us; so that our very struggle to bear that reality within ourselves for the sake of others, is not just possible, it is the very act of seeking God, of seeking and meeting the love of God poured out for us. 

“Here’s the challenge,” I said to this young man. The questions you’re asking, the challenges you see between the words of Scripture and the actions of Christians are exactly the ones you should be asking. They are the very ones that Jesus asked his own people. But here’s the thing to remember. You are not Jesus. You are the Pharisee, the Sadducee, the Samaritan. You are Peter when he denies Jesus. You are the blind and deaf disciples. We all are. And you know this. You project onto others your own failure to love. Your judgment you think hides you and your failures from God’s fierce and demanding love will come back on you if you persist; it will harden your heart with contempt not simply for the other, but for yourself. And if you’re not careful, you’ll become obsessed with demonizing others and finally your own self. And you will crumple away from the courage of love demanded of you by God.

So don’t imagine you can stand outside that which has created all things, as if science will provide you an answer to what is and how we have subjective experience, an ability to reason, our capacity to recognize that some acts are virtuous and others aren’t. No. Instead, love. Love as Christ loved. Love is exercising the courage of submitting yourself to those who are just like you, struggling to see, know, and follow the God who has bound us all to himself, who calls us to struggle with ourselves, through relationships with one another, to be changed, transformed, sanctified, and made into the witnesses he calls us to be. AMEN