Doubt on Steroids

Then Jesus said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” John 20:27



I’ve known some serious doubters in my time and quite often I’ve been one of them.

I’ve also known some frivolous doubters who simply wish to distinguish themselves from silly simpletons of faith. They think Christians view God as a white bearded misogynist who sits on a cloud behind pearly gates, glaring at Muslims and grumbling ominously about same sex marriages. 

Those who don’t believe this god exists are welcome to their atheism, and they would include most church attenders.

Some doubters, however, are merely intellectual posers. They find it cool to be an agnostic or atheist. It makes them look smarter than their church going friends and it declares their emancipation from pious, controlling parents.

And there are doubters who doubt out of laziness, either because they don’t wish to trouble themselves with deep questions about the meaning of life, or because it gives them an excuse to stay in bed on Sunday mornings.

But I’m not thinking about bush league doubters. I’m thinking about persons whose doubt is on steroids, mounting daily, cramping the synapses of their frontal cortex, torturing them with illusions of insight while shrinking their cerebral testicles.

For doubters such as this, Thomas is the patron saint. 

His was not the kind of doubt that enabled him to sleep late or feel superior to his believing friends.

His was a throbbing doubt, and the toothy grins of his fellow disciples tortured him. 

What did Thomas want to believe more than anything else? 

That Jesus was alive. 

What did he know could never happen? 

That a dead man could return to life. 

While his friends snickered, he continued to mourn.

Many of us share the pain of knowing a loved one is gone and can never return. The pain may fade slightly over the years, but it never goes away.

As is often the case in social media, I have a Facebook friend I’ve never met. She is a Baptist minister and prison chaplain who contacted me at the National Council of Churches to ask the council’s help in securing clemency for a death row inmate. Interventions from the Council and from the Pope did no good and the prisoner was executed, but I remained in touch with the chaplain in Facebook.

Shortly after the execution of the prisoner, the chaplain learned her young daughter had a particularly dangerous form of cancer. The mother decided to share her pain with her Facebook friends. For months, I was among those who prayed and laughed and wept as this child’s prognosis rose and fell. At first it seemed the chemotherapy was working. Then the cancer returned, and the doctors said one of her legs must be amputated. This was a tough decision for the mother of a child who wanted to be a dancer, but there was still hope the operation would save her life. Nevertheless, a year ago, this beautiful little girl died.

Not long ago, my friend placed this message on Facebook:

Not sure why I want my FB world to know, but I just need to share. I hurt. Being a bereaved mother sucks. I miss her smile, her crystal blue eyes and knowing how she would be thinking about the world. Not worth listing all the things I miss ... because it is every single thing. I know it isn’t realistic, but it doesn't stop my heart from screaming, “Please come home ... please ... I need you back.”

While his glib friends were smiling, Thomas the Doubter was feeling a pain akin to this. “Please come back home, Jesus, please, I need you back,” But as any sensible human being must, he would have added, “I know it isn’t realistic.” He doubted. And so would we.

Doubt is not a trifling thing. Doubt is pain. Doubt is facing the fact that we can never have what we want most, what we need most. Doubt is the ultimate darkness. It’s ironic that we have been raised to think of Thomas as a man of little faith, when in fact his doubts were logical. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side,” he said, “I will not believe.” It was a cry of agony, not arrogance.

In 2008, the National Council of Churches was observing the 100th anniversary of the founding of its predecessor organization, the Federal Council of Churches in the USA.

As webpage editor, I was assigned to develop a monthly series of “ecumenical moments” that highlighted special events in the history of the Council. 

I looked for leaders and events that called attention to the special ministries of the Council. There was Arthur Flemming, a Republican member of President Eisenhower’s cabinet who was an eloquent advocate for Civil Rights; Harold Stassen and J. Irwin Miller, often touted as men who should have been president of the United States; Cynthia Wedel, a pioneering advocate for women’s rights and a member of President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women; Eugene Carson Blake, who linked arms with Martin Luther King, Jr., on the 1963 “I have a dream” march with Washington.

All were persons of great faith and all were activists for peace, equal rights, and justice.

But as I leafed through the pages of Outlook, a magazine published by the Council from 1950 to 1953, I realized I was missing an important ministry not always associated with the National Council of Churches: evangelism.

I was surprised to discover the Council had a director of evangelism in the early fifties. He was a fiery, energetic preacher named Charles Templeton, who happened to be a good friend of Billy Graham. A long article in Outlook described Templeton’s homiletical zeal and remarkable success in winning souls for Jesus.

Yes! I thought. Perfect! What better example of the Council’s little known evangelical side? Was Templeton still alive? Was he still in the evangelism biz? I jumped on my computer and began searching for him.

I didn’t find Charles, but I found his son and gave him a call.

“I was just reading an old article about your dad’s years as evangelist for the National Council of Churches,” I said.

“Oh,” he replied, sounding interested.

“Is your dad still around?”

“He died in 2001.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You knew, right?”

“What?”

“You knew he became an atheist and left the Council?”

Whoops.

So much for the NCC evangelism story.

Digging a little further, I discovered Templeton had written a book in 1996, Farewell to God, My Reasons for Rejecting the Christian Faith.

The book includes an account of his encounter with his old pal, Billy Graham.

In the course of our conversation I said, “But, Billy, it’s simply not possible any longer to believe, for instance, the biblical account of creation. The world was not created over a period of days a few thousand years ago; it has evolved over millions of years. It’s not a matter of speculation; it’s a demonstrable fact.” 

“I don’t accept that,” Billy replied.

Charles Templeton had become a man of doubt. And he was no facile doubter. He was a doubter on steroids.

But, like Thomas, his doubts brought him pain.

Lee Strobel, the Christian journalist and author of The Case for Faith, recounts an interview he had with Templeton when he was in his 80s.

Strobel asked the aging atheist to update his thoughts about Jesus. Templeton’s response surprised him.

“He was,” Templeton began, “the greatest human being who has ever lived. He was a moral genius. His ethical sense was unique. He was the intrinsically wisest person that I’ve ever encountered in my life or in my readings. His commitment was total and led to his own death, much to the detriment of the world. What could one say about him except that this was a form of greatness?”
“Well, yes, he is the most important thing in my life ... I know it may sound strange, but I have to say , I adore him.  Everything good I know, everything decent I know, everything pure I know, I learned from Jesus. Yes. And tough! Just look at Jesus. He castigated people. He was angry. People don’t think of him that way, but they don’t read the Bible. He had a righteous anger. He cared for the oppressed and exploited. There’s no question that he had the highest moral standard, the least duplicity, the greatest compassion, of any human being in history. There have been many other wonderful people, but Jesus is Jesus.
“In my view,” he declared, “he is the most important human being who has ever existed.”
That’s when Templeton uttered the words I never expected to hear from him. “And if I may put it this way,” he said as his voice began to crack, “I miss him!”

What happens to the doubters when they near the end of their lives?

Thomas does not reappear in the canonical bible after his encounter with Jesus, but tradition says he sailed to India in A.D. 52 to found some of the world’s oldest Christian churches. It shows what a doubter can do when his faith is renewed.

But – and one might sigh, Alas! – Jesus never appeared to Charles Templeton to invite him to feel his wounds. Templeton remained in doubt to the end of his life.

But Templeton’s words to Strobel remind us of something Frederick Buechner wrote in The Faces of Jesus:  “Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.”

At the end of his life, Charles Templeton did not retract his doubt. But his words suggest he never lost the ants in his pants, either.

And whatever state his faith was in when he died, it is evident he never lost his fascination – or adoration – for Jesus, “the most important human being who ever existed.”

Jesus has that way of grabbing hold of one, even one who has never encountered his resurrected body or touched his wounds.

What does Thomas have in common with Charles the Doubter and all the other doubters-on-steroids who struggle to understand the secrets of the world?

I think the answer is this:

We may have periods in our lives – long periods, endless periods, when we lose touch with God or Jesus.

But God’s Holy Spirit never lets go of us.

And whether we are able to speak the words or not, whether we know it or not, there will never be a time we are out of the loving presence of our Lord and our God.
____
In the picture above, the man standing between Charles Templeton and Billy Graham is Torrey Johnson, founder of Youth for Christ; the three are planning an evangelistic trip to Europe.)

The Dark Night of the Soul. In a Good Way.

Easter Sunday came in darkness. 

When the gloom descended the previous Friday, the whole world was engulfed in shadow. 

The shades of Saturday deepened, and when Sunday came at midnight, the darkness was absolute.

The Galilean’s disciples welcomed the darkness because it hid them from Herod’s agents. They huddled in grief and fear. Never had God seemed so far away.

The sun’s light failed at noon on Friday, and the meager crowd could barely make out the features of the three forlorn men nailed to crosses of execution. 

So, too, the men on crosses were engulfed in the darkness, feeling abandoned by their friends and spurned by God. 

Jesus felt the loneliness, too, crying into the blackness, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”

There are over twelve thousand dark nights in a lifetime of 33 years. 

Jesus had been awake for many of them, contemplating his mission from God. Even through the darkest nights, when he couldn’t see his hand in front of his face, he could feel God’s presence.

But dark had come early that Friday, and Jesus knew this was his last nighttime on earth. God felt far away.

In the darkness, he must have reflected on how close God felt during all the days of his life, even when he was struggling with how to carry out his special calling.

Posing in his secret identity as Jesus Bar Joseph, Jesus knew his very existence was an unprecedented moment, not only for humanity, but also for the Creator.

As a man, the Son of God had sampled most of the joys and woes of human existence: hunger and thirst, pain and pleasure, loneliness and friendship. 

Until the Son of God took on human flesh, these were but vicarious experiences for the Creator of the Universe: merely theoretical suppositions that this is how the created experience life. 

But Jesus rose and fell with all the heaving waves of human existence, without a safety vest, vulnerable and unprotected. 

He laughed. He cried. He reveled in friendship and reeled at rejection. 

Sometimes he fasted, sometimes he ate too much. Sometimes his critics called him a glutton. Sometimes they called him a drunk. Often they called him crazy.

Perhaps the only human experience Jesus did not know was motherhood, the ecstasy and pain that comes with bringing life into the world. His own mother felt the ecstasy, but now, at the foot of the cross, she remembers an old man’s prediction three decades earlier: the day will come when a sword will pierce your heart.

Throughout his lifetime, Jesus experienced what it was like to live the same way we all do.  

Life was being warmed by the sun and burned by the sun. 

Life was being refreshed by the rain, and chilled by the rain. 

Life was feeling comforted and fulfilled by human touches, and frustrated by human touches that brought unbidden pleasures. 

Life was being happy one moment, sad the next. 

And Jesus had a unique set of pressures we cannot imagine. 

He knew at an early age who he was, and what God expected him to do. He was God’s son.

He was being sent into the world not merely to sample its sensations, tastes and smells. He was sent into the world to redeem the world. 

He was God’s son, sent to be a living example of God’s unconditional love, and sent to show people how to love unconditionally. 

Now, in the darkness so complete he could not see his mother’s face, he knew that he had arrived at the final stage of his ministry, a climax he dreaded but knew he could not evade.

Here he was, in the blackness, dying in agony on a crude slab of wood, the final stage in God’s plan to save the world.

What did Jesus think when he first knew he was God’s messiah?

That question is left to our imagination. 

As a child did his uniqueness puzzle him? 

As a hormonal adolescent, did it exhilarate him to know he was genuinely God’s gift to women, and men? 

As a young man yearning for a normal life with a wife, family, and friends, did he try to escape it? Nikos Kazantzakis imagines God forced to pursue a reluctant Jesus relentlessly, digging talons into his scalp until he surrendered to his call.

But surrender he did, and faithfully he walked the dusty paths of Galilee to proclaim the arrival of God’s loving realm.

And now, it was over.

Jesus had been hanging on the cross for hours. He, like the two thieves beside him, was dying slowly of asphyxiation. He could no longer fill his lungs with air.

That is why his last words must be shouted. It requires an act of enormous will to summon the very last of his strength, the very last of his air, to force the words out of his mouth:

“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

His last words express an intimate familiarity with God that has undergirded him all the years of his ministry: Abba! Papa! I am coming to you.

His last words are a shout of triumph that he has fulfilled his appointed task to be God’s instrument for the forgiveness of sinful humanity. His last words are a prayer of gratitude that his onerous tasks are over. 

His last words may even be a signal that he has forgiven God for putting him through this.

And now, in the darkness, he breathes his last. 

In the darkness, God prepares the setting for what is to happen next.

In the darkness.

Admittedly, we are a little creeped out by the darkness. But theologian Barbara Brown Taylor invites us to embrace the darkness, because – as the ancient mystics understood – darkness holds the divine mystery.

Taylor’s new book, Learning to Walk in the Darkness, is TIME magazine’s cover story this week.

An excerpt from the story:

The preacher in Taylor points out that darkness was often the setting for humanity’s closest encounters with the divine. God appeared to Abraham in the night and promised him descendants more numerous than the stars. The exodus from Egypt happened at night. God met Moses in the thick darkness atop Mount Sinai to hand down the Ten Commandments. The apostle Paul’s conversion happened after he lost his sight. Jesus was born beneath a star and resurrected in the darkness of a cave. “If we turn away from darkness on principle,” she asks, “doing everything we can to avoid it because there is simply no telling what it contains, isn’t there a chance we are running away from God?”

Usually, when we think of Easter day, we think of the misty morning light in the garden. We think of the two Marys, perhaps after another sleepless might, blink their eyes in incredulity at what the light reveals: the Lord has risen!

But as Barbara Brown Taylor points out, the miracle itself happened in the dark. 

Quoting Taylor, TIME reports: 

“Most of the world’s major religions have something helpful to say about finding God in the shadows. Gautama Buddha meditated in the caves of northern India. Muhammad received the Koran in a cave outside Mecca. St. Francis prayed in a tiny grotto near Assisi. Darkness is inviting everyone in to know God, Taylor believes, to heal us of our weaknesses and strengthen us for the journey.”

She could have added that it was in the darkness, in Gethsemane, that Jesus felt a special closeness to God on the night before he was arrested.

In her book, Taylor writes, “I have learned things in the dark that I could never have learned in the light, things that have saved my life over and over again, so that there is really only one logical conclusion. I need darkness as much as I need light.”

Now, in the bright sunlight of Easter Day, we pause to ponder exactly what has happened in the darkness.

The Lord is risen.

The Lord is risen in darkness, and he invites us to engage in our own special communion with God, in the darkness.
And to begin that journey, we can reflect in daylight that it was – to coin a phrase – when all seemed darkest that Jesus gave his life to reconcile us with the God of love.

In darkness he cried out, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

His last words express the partnership of God the Father and God the Son for expressing unconditional love.

This is the great joy of Easter that can sustain us throughout out lives.

And when our own light begins to dim, when the ultimate darkness descends on us, Jesus’ sacrifice makes it possible to follow him to abundant life, joyously repeating after him: 

Papa, Poppi, Daddy,  we throw ourselves into your loving arms, forever.

You're Not Going to Believe This

Ezekiel 37:1-14
John 11:1-45

If you haven’t seen The Book of Mormon, the award winning Broadway musical by the creators of South Park, you’re in for a surprise.

For me, the biggest surprise is that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has purchased ads in the musical’s program. “You’ve seen the play,” the ads say, “Now Read the Book.”

It’s a surprise because the show doesn’t exactly portray Mormonism is the best light. If the show had done a similar number on American Baptists, we would have sued.

The musical, by Trey Parker, Robert Lopez, and Matt Stone, exposes all the difficulties facing a Mormon missionary:

The original prophet, Joseph Smith, who claimed the angel Moroni showed him where to dig up golden plates etched with a non-existent language that told about Jesus’ visit to America in the hours between his crucifixion and resurrection;

The plates themselves, which Smith said were snatched back by Moroni and could not be shown to anyone;

The fact that Smith said he transcribed the Book of Mormon after Moroni showed how to translate it, and which yielded a product that sounded like a poor imitation of King James Era English;

And alleged revelations that white men are entitled to all the concubines they could tolerate, but black men are evil.

No sane missionary wants to explain all this away while struggling to persuade an audience that God’s revelation in the Book of Mormon will make people happier, wealthier, and wiser.

A scene in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America raises the inevitable question. Hannah Pitt, a devout Mormon wife and mother, is witnessing to her depressed daughter-in-law, Harper.

“There’s something that’s always bothered me,” Harper says, bating her mother-in-law. “Everyone thinks the angel’s name was Mormon.”

“No,” Mother Pitt replies, exasperated. “The name of the angel …”

“I know, I went to Sunday school. Moroni.”

“Right. The angel Moroni.”

“So why don’t we call ourselves Morons?”

It’s hard to watch The Book of Mormon and not think of this line.

In the musical, the missionaries – Elder Price and Elder Cunningham – are burdened not only by the book’s improbable claims, but by their own ambitions and limitations.

Elder Price imagines himself as a heroic missionary who will save the world, preferably in a comfortable assignment in Orlando, Fla.

But the plot clots when the two missionaries are coupled for service in Uganda – not the real Uganda but a grotesquery that seems right out of the hemorrhoidal delirium of Idi Amin.

The two arrive in a Ugandan village beset with famine, poverty, and AIDS, and controlled by a deranged warlord who orders all the women to be circumcised.

It’s not a mission field white unto harvest, and the two missionaries are out of their element.

Ironically – as is often the case in the best missionary stories – it is the least clued missionary who makes the most progress.

Elder Cunningham, a short, overweight and overwrought young man, is handicapped by the fact he has never read the Book of Mormon “because it’s boring.”

What Elder Cunningham doesn’t know about the Book of Mormon, he makes up from his extensive knowledge of Star-Trek, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings.

Applying song, dance, and a riotous monologue to his outlandish teachings, Elder Cunningham inserts storm troopers, Jedi Knights, Ewoks, Vaders, faeries, and raped frogs into the heretofore boring story of Joseph Smith.

The villagers buy it, enthusiastically. Where his straight-laced missionary partners have failed, Elder Cunningham wins converts to his eclectic but bizarrely improbable latter day gospel.

He wins so many converts, in fact, that the mission station becomes the most successful Mormon outpost in Africa.

But the bubble bursts when the district superintendent visits the village and the new converts put on a play to dramatize their skewed understanding of the Mormon story.

The superintendent is appalled and closes the mission immediately. The villagers are saddened that the one thing that has given them hope has been cancelled. 

One of the villagers, the beautiful Nabulungi, is devastated by the revelation that the stories she has been told are not true.

Happily, none of the other villagers are disturbed by the lack of veracity in the missionary stories. A woman scolds Nabulungi for her naivete. “Did you think these stories were true?” she asks. “They were MET-A-PHORS.”

At the end of the show – spoiler alert – the villagers, including the sadistic warlord, have embraced their new faith, Ewoks and all, because it has brought them into communion with God’s love.

It was the loving, albeit wildly inaccurate testimonies of the missionaries that did it.

As the curtain closes, the once woebegone villagers bask in love for God, Jesus, Joseph Smith, and each other.

I can see why the Mormons buy approving ads in the show’s programs. If I were a Mormon, I’d be proud of both my church and these wacky missionaries. They strayed so far from the truth that truth emerged pure and whole. They demonstrated the crushing power of MET-A-PHORS.

We Baptists and other creedal Christians have long scorned the Mormon’s implausible and unconvincing tales of angels, golden plates, and Jesus’ pre-resurrection visit to America. (Creedally, Jesus descended into hell after his crucifixion, not Salt Lake City.)

But we creedal Christians have our own burden of implausible and unconvincing tales to tell.

Today’s scripture lessons place a couple of those tales before us now: the valley of the dry bones and the raising of a man dead four days.

Our grandparents and earlier ancestors had little problem with these incredible miracles. They avoided a careful forensic analysis. It takes too much fun out of bible stories if you don’t regard them as inerrant, literal truths. We slam the door on theological conversations when we declare, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

But as we contemplate the biological impossibility of restoring flesh to long dead bones, or revivifying a corpse in an advanced state of decomposition, we begin to understand why many people are skeptical about our well-meaning testimonies. “Can’t happen, don’t buy it, go away,” is the counter argument.

So what is the truth about the dry bones and the regenerated corpse?

People will argue about it until the end of time. As persons of faith, we can insist that God has the power to restore flesh to dried bones, and God has the power raise the dead. And skeptical agnostics can smile condescendingly and tell us that what we are saying is impossible.

But perhaps both sides are missing the point.

Whether these remarkable things happened or not, whether they are true of not, they are also MET-A-PHORS that point to a larger truth:

God loves us, and God will continue to love us today, tomorrow, and after this earthly life is over. Jesus put it plainly enough: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live.” (John 11:25)

What does that mean, biologically, spiritually, forensically?

Who knows? We can argue about it until we die, scorning those who don’t believe it and telling ourselves that if we stop thinking about it, that settles it.

But that would be missing the point.

It’s a MET-A-PHOR.

The truth it conveys is that the loving God has invited each of us, persons of faith and persons of doubt, into God’s eternal dominion.

And – in ways we cannot possibly understand or define now – we shall bask in God’s endless care and love forever.

There is no better tale than that.

Cocksure

John 3:1-17

Nicodemus was embarrassed. Obviously.

I mean, he waited until it was dark to talk to Jesus, who Nico's fellow Pharisees thought was a dangerous heretic.

And Nico's first words to Jesus implied he was impressed by the Nazarene but unsure who he really was.

“Rabbi,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”

Nicodemus sounds like someone who doesn’t know what he’s thinking until he says words and then examines them to see what he thinks about them.

Very likely, he’s hoping Jesus’ response will cut through his fog and tell him exactly who he is.

“You got it, Nic,” Jesus could have said. “I have come from God. In fact, I AM God. Get it? I AM.”

But that’s not the way the conversation goes. Brushing aside Nicodemus’ tentative words, Jesus abruptly declares that Nicodemus doesn’t have a clue and will never have a clue until he is born again. Or, in other translations, born from above.

Either way, Nicodemus’ doubts are not assuaged. He has come to Jesus an agnostic, and – unable to interpret Jesus’ puzzling aphorisms – departs an agnostic.

This inability to fully believe something must have been unsettling for a Pharisee, who made his living by following clear-cut rules and fully accepting the tiniest esoterica of the law.

We have tended to deride Nicodemus at this stage of his faith development because he cannot grasp what Jesus is telling him. We know, of course, what Jesus means by “born again,” and we chuckle behind Nicodemus’ back because he doesn’t know.

But if we think about it more charitably, perhaps Nicodemus can be forgiven his agnosticism.

“The trouble with the world,” said Bertrand Russell, one of the great agnostics of the 20th century, “is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Christians and other persons of faith have not always agreed with Dr. Russell, but we can certainly affirm the truth of that. Just about everyone we know – at family reunions, in class, at the office, in church – is either stupidly cocksure or intelligently full of doubt.

Yet for Christians, doubt is such an opprobrium. Doubt implies spiritual weakness. Doubt implies disrespect for God. Doubt is – well, it’s downright embarrassing.

Be that as it may, doubt is not only common among us – it is universal.

Frederick Buechner, the Presbyterian scholar and pastor, puts it this way:

An agnostic is somebody who doesn't know for sure whether there really is a God. That is some people all of the time and all people some of the time.There are some agnostics who don't know simply because they've never taken pains to try to find out—like the bear who didn't know what was on the other side of the mountain.There are other agnostics who have taken many pains. They have climbed over the mountain, and what do you think they saw? Only the other side of the mountain. At least that was all they could be sure of. That faint glimmer on the far horizon could have been just Disneyland.

Agnostics generally fall on both sides of the Bertrand Russell divide. Some are cocksure and never bother to think about God while others work hard to rationalize their doubts.

Having been in that latter category myself, off and on throughout my life, I tend to admire those who keep coming back to reexamine their doubts. 

Like many Baptists, my faith was at its pinnacle when I went forward during an evangelical service to be born again. My doubts were few when I was re-baptized by immersion at the age of 20. I have felt God’s presence, powerfully and palpably, on many occasions, especially when I sat beside my dying mother’s bed to read the 23rd Psalm to her.

But these moments did not seal my faith and on other occasions I wonder if God is a figment of my imagination. An unexpected life crisis, the inexplicable death of a precious friend who had much to live for, or unspeakable tragedies such as the shooting deaths of 26 innocents at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, make one wonder if there is a God in charge. Or is the universe random and ungoverned?

It is entirely capricious that mountain top moments of unequivocal faith are balanced throughout our lives in dark valleys of doubt.

One of my early mentors was a Roman Catholic priest from Detroit, an Air Force chaplain named Dick Kucharski. Most of the airmen called him Father Kuch, and he was a man of deep faith and a superb spiritual leader. Masses overflowed with single airmen who responded to his compassion and charisma.

But as his assistant, I saw Father Kuch in his moments of doubt. His lowest moments were carnal, as is the case with most of us. And when he watched a particularly beautiful woman pass by, you could feel his pain – and his doubts. “If there’s no heaven,” he whispered to me on one such occasion, “I am so screwed.”

Years later I heard Father Kuch resigned from the Air Force, left the priesthood, and got married in Detroit. I remember thinking at the time that this career change probably salved his doubts and saved his soul.

If I learned anything from Father Kuch, it was that the detritus of doubt clutters our path to salvation, and faith is a constant struggle.

I confess that is one reason I have never favored the evangelical approach that presents faith as a simple certainty, or warns that a failure to invite Jesus into one’s heart may result in eternal damnation. 

That kind of cocksure sales approach is a manipulative ruse, and ignores Paul’s plea to the church at Philippi to continue working out their salvation “with fear and trembling.” (Philippians 2:12)

The main problem with being cocksure about something is that you never have to reexamine it. You never get the opportunity to reflect on whether you’re right or wrong. 

We may feel justified in declaring  “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” Certainly it saves time spent in thought. But too often, the declaration prevents you from going back to God to make sure you’re right. 

Doubt, on the other hand, requires you to continually reexamine your faith, clarifying it, improving it, certifying it.

Jesus talked to Nicodemus about the distinctions between the flesh and the spirit, and the Pharisee was befuddled by doubt. “How can these things be?” he asked.

Jesus responded, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? Very truly, I tell you, we speak of what we know and testify to what we have seen; yet you do not receive our testimony. If I have told you about earthly things and you do not believe, how can you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?” (John 3:10-12)

The point Jesus is leading up to, of course, is the one we quote at each other all the time:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” (John 3:16)

In fact, it is precisely that statement that we tend not to think about. God said it, I believe it, that settles it.

But for Nicodemus, the conversation with Jesus was the beginning of a profound mental struggle that called into question all of his Pharisaical assumptions and legalistic faith.

Unlike most other Pharisees, who were cocksure they were right and Jesus was wrong, Nicodemus continued to nurse his doubts.

In the end, he was rewarded with a revelation that was impossible for his cocksure brethren. That revelation was a sudden understanding that God had indeed sent his only son into the world, and faith in that son was the foundation of salvation.

Soon, Nicodemus was risking the ridicule of the chief priests and Pharisees by defending Jesus in their councils.

And when Jesus’ own disciples fled from him at the time of his crucifixion, Nicodemus was present to arrange for his burial. (John 19:39)

Doubt had brought Nicodemus a long way.

No doubt he, like all of us, continued to struggle with his doubts.

But it is always the struggle that tests our faith, affirms it, and strengthens it in the end.

In a world that is divided between the cocksure and the doubters, it seems obvious:

The place to enjoy the highest quality interaction with God is with the doubters.

Old Scratch

Matthew 4:1-11. Jesus is tempted by the devil in the Wilderness.

Back in the day, before YouTube and DVDs, Christian educators provided Sunday schools with bible comic books. When a child’s imagination failed, a comic book artist provided images of Jesus.

The comic book Jesus I recall imitated traditional images of Salman’s Head of Christ. Comic book Jesus’ long hair and beard were India ink black, and he walked around with a finger evocatively crooked to emphasize the points of his sermons.

Other than Jesus, the most easily recognized character in the comics was the Devil. 

Satan was drawn with a pointy goatee and horns, and his face was frozen in a seductive leer. He was too scary looking to convince anyone of the joys of sinning. But we never doubted that the real Satan looked just like the villain in the comics.

At some point in our psychological maturing, just after we imagined Satan as a horned imp with hoofs and just before we concluded there was no such thing as a real devil, we had to wonder. What does Satan look like?

In the 2000 Coen brothers film, O Brother Where Art Thou?  three white escaped convicts pick up a black hitchhiker. In 1930s Alabama, this is an act of unusual largess, but the convicts are endearingly eccentric.

The hitchhiker is carrying a guitar, and the convicts ask him what he has been up to. The young man admits he has just sold his soul to the devil.

“What’d the devil give you for your soul, Tommy?” asks one of the convicts.

“Well, he taught me to play this here guitar real good.”

The convicts are appalled.

“Oh son, for that you sold your everlasting soul?”

The hitchhiker shrugs sadly. “Well, I wasn’t usin’ it.”

But the convicts want to know more.

“I’ve always wondered,” asked one. “What's the devil look like?”

One of the convicts, a pseudo-intellectual played by George Clooney, offers an opinion:

“Well, there are all manner of lesser imps and demons … but the great Satan hisself is red and scaly with a bifurcated tail, and he carries a hay fork.”

The hitchhiker demurs.

“Oh, no. No, sir. He's white, as white as you folks, with empty eyes and a big hollow voice. He likes to travel around with a mean old hound.”

How many of you think the devil is white? If you do, you wouldn't be alone. In A Black Theology of Liberation, African American theologian James Cone rejects a God who loves white oppressors as much as he loves their victims. Cone preferred the more aggressive activism of Malcolm X, who initially thought of white people as devils, and discounted the non-violent movement of Martin Luther King, Jr. 

But if the devil is not white, what does he look like?
Most of us grew with a looming image of Satan in “Night on Bald Mountain,” an excerpt in Walt Disney’s pre-psychedelic animated feature Fantasia. The winged devil elevates himself to a great and menacing height in the darkness.   If Disney’s sinister animation and dark strains of Mussorgsky’s music don’t give you the creeps, nothing will.

Another great cinematic images of Satan was provided by Robert DeNiro. This is not surprising because DeNiro has been equally convincing as a deranged taxi driver, charming mobsters, brutal boxers, and even Frankenstein’s monster. In the 1987 film noir Angel Heart, DeNiro plays Louis Cyphre, which translates to Lucifer. His nom de guerre seems too obvious but the other characters don’t recognize who he really is until the end of the film. And he has chosen “Louis Cyphre,” DeNiro’s character explains, because “Mephistopheles is such a mouthful.” 

Louis Cyphre has shoulder-length black hair. He has long, delicately manicured fingernails, and an unctious charm that is at once reassuring and threatening. In Cyphre’s most disquieting scene, he slowly and meticulously cracks the shell of a hardboiled egg, noting “You know, some religions think that the egg is the symbol of the soul.” 

The thing all these devils have in common is that they are easy to identify. Most of us would recognize these devils in the wilderness. Only blind fools would succumb to their wiles.

But what if the devil came to us not in the desert, but in our homes, on the Internet, on television, or in the mall? 

And what if he were not so easy to recognize?

When God created each of us, God had unique plans for us: plans for the way we would look and plans for how we would use our special gifts to serve God. Our bone structure, height, weight, genetic disposition, personality, and talents are all gifts of God. And any external pressure to get us to change those gifts may be demonic.

Do you see Satan in the pages of a magazine, or in television advertising?

Consider the effect these media have on most of us, especially adolescent girls. They place before us an unrealistic and generally unnatural ideal of beauty that convinces most of us we are woefully inadequate.

According to one study, the average American woman is 5 feet 4 inches and weighs 140 pounds. The average model is 5 feet 11 inches and weighs 120 pounds.

And 5 feet 11 inches is a reasonably healthy weight. Many models are pressed to diet themselves into skeletal specters. 

Some, including 19-year-old Bethaney Wallace and 28 year-old Isabelle Caro, died of anorexia while they were still modeling. Caro weighed 60 pounds when she posed, reclining and staring balefully over her right shoulder, for an advertising campaign for the Italian fashion label Nolita in 2007. She was 5 feet 4 inches tall.

As tragic as these stories are, it is even sadder that uncounted thousands of young girls believe these models present essential standards of beauty. These girls believe they are too short, too fat, and not pretty enough. 

If this is not succumbing to satanic temptation, what is? 

When children of God disregard the beauty God has given them to pursue an unnatural standard of beauty, and whenever they discard their God-given talents to obsess about this unnatural beauty, it’s the work of the devil.

The problem is, it doesn’t look like the devil. It looks like creative media advertising. 

According to reports, nearly all magazine cover photos of female celebrities have been altered to make them appear younger, prettier, and skinnier than they actually are. 

Only a handful of women – Beyoncé and Kate Winslet to name two – have told this Satan to get behind them. “My legs are not that skinny,” Winslet told one magazine publisher. “I like my legs the way they are.”

Human nature being what it is, it’s doubtful we will learn to be grateful for the bodies, faces, and – yes – male pattern baldness God has given us, or to truly believe that if this is the way God has made us, we must be beautiful. 

And the reason for that, perhaps, is that we don’t quite believe a poor self-image is a trick of the devil.

There are so many other devils who beguile us without our full recognition of who we are dealing with.

Sports heroes may be compelling models for kids who aspire to the playing field, and we can name scores of athletes who set high standards. But when the athletes are found to be using steroidal shortcuts to sinewy superiority, it’s probable the devil made them do it.

Most of the time we allow the devil to slink into our lives because he is an attractive sort who we’d like to know better. Most often, he’s a hot specimen of the opposite sex. 

Almost as often, he’s a special friend at the office who convinces you the bosses will never notice if you “borrow” a few offices supplies. 

He’s a likable peer at school who convinces you everyone is snorting a few lines of cocaine, or teaches you how to lift a few items from Kohl’s. 

He’s a charismatic politician who fuels your resentment toward members of the community who are not like you.

And – and this is important to note – he’s a preacher quoting scripture. 

Jesus easily deflected the devil’s scriptural assaults in the wilderness, but that never stopped the devil from using scripture to justify his godless schemes.

Ever since the encounter in the wilderness, the devil and his minions have been quoting scripture to make the most transparent evil seem to be God’s holy will.

Scripture quoting preachers sent bloody crusades into the Holy Land to slaughter Muslims in the name of Jesus.

Scripture quoting preachers justified hideous tortures of so-called heretics who confessed the same Lord they did.

Scripture quoting preachers justify declarations of war by one Christian nation against another.

Scripture quoting preachers justify human slavery.

Scripture quoting preachers justify the exclusion of women from leadership in the church.

Scripture quoting preachers justify the exclusion and persecution of gays and lesbians in the church and throughout society. 

Often scripture quoting preachers hope to disguise their true colors. But whenever you hear someone declaring, “God hates Muslims,” or “God hates fags,” you can be sure they are preaching Satan’s sermon.

In most other cases, however, it’s not easy to recognize Satan. And if he isn’t presenting himself with horns and a tail, how will we know it’s him?

Jesus gave us a clue to that when he sent Satan on his way in the wilderness.

“Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

Those who worship the Lord in spirit and in truth have discovered something very distinctive about our God.
Our God is love.

The God of love does not ask you to hate or exclude other members of the human race, or to seek their destruction, or to despise them because they are different, or to minimize their significance because of their gender. 

Nor does the God of love urge you to despise yourself because you don’t think you are pretty enough, or skinny enough, or popular enough.

Whenever these kinds of thoughts get into your head, you can be sure they are not from God, or from Jesus who told you the greatest commandments are to love God and to love your neighbors as you love yourself.

Any attempt to confuse you on these points is from the devil. That is why he is called the deceiver, the adversary, the enemy, and the father of lies.

And sometimes it’s very hard to recognize old Scratch when he appears at your door. 

But he will always give himself away by his inability to steer you in the direction of God’s unconditional love, for one another and for yourself.