Questions in the Dark

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Luke 7:18-23

January 18, 2015 • Portage First UMC

I am up two or three times during a typical night—which may be more information than you wanted to have about me—but, like you, I don't turn on the light when I get up at home because I know my way around the house, even in the dark. That becomes more challenging, however, when we’re staying with friends or when I’m at a hotel—or, really, any unfamiliar place. I get up, and I have to be extra careful because I don’t know my way around, I don’t know what obstacles lie in the way, and it’s not uncommon for me to stub a toe or hit my leg while trying to walk in the dark—just to remind me that I’m not at home! Darkness can hide obstacles and can be a challenge when we’re trying to navigate. And what’s true in the physical world is even more true in the spiritual world. There are times when we find ourselves walking in spiritual darkness—not necessarily a darkness of unbelief, though that may be true sometimes and for some of us. More likely, though, we find ourselves in the midst of times of doubt, of difficulty, of struggle—times that early church fathers called “the dark night of the soul.” And in those times, questions come that we usually don’t have easy answers for. It’s in the dark that our faith is challenged, tested even, and what kind of person we become is determined by the way we confront the questions in the dark.

During this first month of this year, we’ve been looking at the theme of “Broken,” the ways we find life challenging, and we’re looking at those things in hopes of finding healing and new life in this new year. So far, we’ve talked about the ways our life gets broken by unforgiveness, and the way relationships get broken as well. This morning, I want to take us on a slightly different (and more personal) journey as we focus on the ways we can be broken by doubt, by questions, by challenges to our faith. Sometimes those challenges come in the form of intellectual questions; there are a lot of folks today who, whether seriously or not, like to ask questions such as, “How could a good God allow such and such to happen?” Other times, those challenges and doubts come because of a tragedy—someone in our family gets cancer, a child dies, a school shooting takes place. We could go on and on; there are more than enough tragedies in our world that can cause doubt and uncertainty. Some of you know the story of Bethany Hamilton. She was a championship surfer, on her way to great things when a shark attack took her left arm. In the wake of that tragedy, Bethany found herself with many questions, as depicted in the film Soul Surfer. Take a listen.

VIDEO: Soul Surfer

I love the way her father responds in that clip, because the reality is sometimes tragedies happen and we don’t know why. Sometimes we’re only left with those uneasy questions in the dark, because, let’s be honest, sometimes Jesus just doesn’t come through the way we think he ought to. And no one knew that better than John the Baptizer.

Luke told us way back in chapter 3 that King Herod had locked John up in prison, and he did that because John dared to preach against Herod’s family life. Herod, you see, had stolen his brother’s wife, and John had the audacity to tell him that wasn’t right. So we don’t know exactly how long John has been in prison when we get to Luke 7, but he’s probably been there a while, long enough that it’s beginning to get to him.

John, remember, was the forerunner. He was the one who came to prepare the way for the Messiah, the savior. His birth had been miraculous, though not quite like Jesus’ birth. John was born to an older couple, a childless priestly couple, a husband and wife who were, to all accounts, far beyond childbearing years. And yet, God blessed them with a child, one who would prepare the way for the Lord to come (Luke 1:11-17). Even before his birth, John was a spiritually perceptive child because his mother said he leaped in the womb when Mary, pregnant with Jesus, came to their home (Luke 1:44). And when John grew up, he was a fiery preacher, spending his days out in the wilderness near the Dead Sea. That’s a very inhospitable place; it’s hot and dry and there’s not much to see. It’s not an easy place to live, certainly in those days. Yet people came from all over, Luke says, to hear John preach and to be baptized by him in the Jordan River. And John pulled no punches. I mean, he called the religious leaders a “brood of vipers” and told them they were no better than a pile of stones (Luke 3:7-9). Try that with people you want to win to your side and see how they respond! And yet people listened to John. They followed him, and he faithfully fulfilled the duty he had been given: to prepare people for the coming of the Savior. And when Jesus came to be baptized, John pointed people away from himself and toward Jesus. “Look, the Lamb of God,” he said of Jesus, “who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). He had been as faithful as he knew how. So why, then, was he sitting in this prison cell? And why did it seem he would never get out alive?

When we pick up John’s story in Luke 7, some of his followers have come to visit him. In ancient prisons, you depended on friends and family to supply what you needed; there were no state-provided meals or anything. So some of John’s disciples have come, and while they bring him what he needs they also tell him what Jesus has been up to. They tell him about the way Jesus raised a widow’s son from death. They tell him about how Jesus healed the son of a Roman centurion in Capernaum. They repeat to him some of Jesus’ teachings and how he has said they must love those who are their enemies. And something in that gets to John. There, in the darkness and dampness of that prison cell, in the basement of Herod’s palace, John begins to doubt, to question, to wonder if he has possibly wasted his entire life for nothing. This Jesus, you see, doesn’t seem to be who John hoped and thought the Messiah would be. He’s certainly nothing like John is, and his ministry is much softer in tone than John’s was. John expected the Messiah to be a prophet of justice and reform, but Jesus seems to be insistent on talking about grace and healing (cf. Culpepper, “The Gospel of Luke,” New Interpreter’s Bible, Vol. IX, pg. 160). Besides that, everyone knew that the Messiah was supposed to come and establish a kingdom, an earthly kingdom centered in Jerusalem. Jesus doesn’t seem to be doing anything that would point him in that direction (cf. Wright, Luke for Everyone, pg. 87). And so John, in the darkness of doubt, asks his disciples to go on a fact-finding mission. Go ask Jesus, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we expect someone else?” (7:19-20). I need to know, before I depart this life. Did I waste the life God gave me?

What do you do when Jesus turns out to be someone other than who you thought he was? That moment comes for all of us, at some point, mostly because we tend to try to make Jesus into who we want him to be. Someone once said that God made us in his own image, and then we returned the favor. We try to force Jesus into our idea of who he ought to be. To the historian he is a human being who performed no miracles. To the secularist, he is wandering teacher who proclaimed an ethic of love. To the one who believes the end is near, he is the prophet who brings fire and judgment. To others he is a social reformer, a peasant, a miracle worker, one who is obligated to always make us happy, a cosmic vending machine…and so many other things. We grow up learning about gentle Jesus, meek and mild, and then when we actually read the Gospels, he doesn’t seem so meek or mild. He makes a whip out of cords and throws the money changers out of the temple. He curses certain towns when they don’t receive his ministry. And then he turns around and welcomes children. He deals with those who are hurting in kind ways we can only begin to approach. He rescues a thief on the cross from eternal death and he restores a wayward disciple who denied him.

And then we read about him healing seemingly everyone he comes in contact with, all across Galilee, so that when we pray for healing ourselves, we’re confident he will respond. Until he doesn’t. I’ve shared my own story before, about how my heart murmur was discovered when I was getting my physical to attend Ball State. I asked my home church to pray, and they did. One of the godliest women I have ever been privileged to know prayed for me and assured me Jesus would heal me. But he didn’t, not right then. Healing didn’t come until sixteen years ago this last week when I had surgery to repair the hole in my heart. And yet, on another occasion, when I had a collapsed lung, Jesus chose to heal it overnight. The doctor was left scratching his head. Why was one area of brokenness healed right away and the other was not? As a pastor, I have walked with people, many of you, who have gone through serious illness and devastating circumstances. I’ve prayed for people to be healed, and sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes people who are faithful believers die while those who couldn’t care less about Jesus are healed. I’ve stood by hospital bedsides and open caskets and asked, “Why?” I’ve done funerals for young and old, for children and adults, for those who died natural deaths and those who took their own lives. And I’ve been asked, “Why?” and I don’t have an answer. Each of those situations and countless more remind me that we all sit in the dark from time to time. We all share John’s experience. We think we know who Jesus is, we think we have him figured out, we hope we know how he will work and what he stands for—and then, suddenly, there is a sharp turn in the road. He’s not who we thought he was. And, like John, we sit in the dark and ask, “Are you the one or am I wasting my time?” (cf. Culpepper 161-162).

The church has not always been kind to those who doubt. We point to selected verses that, taken out of context, seem to say you have to be absolutely certain in what you believe, and often without saying anything we shun or ignore those who are struggling to find faith in a hostile world. What we mean by “certainty” today is really just putting God in a box. We believe we have to have God all figured out to be certain, which is part of the reason we have so many different denominations. In an effort to figure God out, we decide he is this and he is not that, and if you believe he is that, then you don’t belong to our group. And we don’t want to admit that how often we sit with John in the dark. Several years ago, author Philip Yancey submitted a book that he wanted to title Disappointment With God. The book dealt with, in Yancey’s words, “three questions no one asks aloud.” The questions were these: Is God unfair? Is God silent? and Is God hidden? The publisher initially balked; they didn’t believe a book simply called Disappointment With God would sell, and so they tried to get Yancey to change the title to something like Dealing With Disappointment With God. Yancey held firm, and the book continues to sell very well. What the publisher failed to realize or admit is that those questions are ones we all face at some point or another. In fact, we have to face them if our faith is going to grow.

Christian educator John Westerhoff has suggested that faith grows through four stages. The first is experienced faith. This is the faith children hold, often learned from their parents. Children observe and even mimic what we do; they “experience” faith not necessarily as an insider but as an observer. They don’t know a lot about it. They just experience it through Sunday School and worship and prayer time at home. The next stage is called affiliative faith, where we know we belong to a certain group of people. We affiliate with them. For instance, I am a Methodist because that’s the church I grew up in. At this point, it’s not so much a matter of what we believe as to whom we belong. Typically, this coincides with confirmation class, as youth and young adults are beginning to test the waters and figure out their own faith identity apart from their parents.

The third stage of faith is called searching faith. This often happens in the late teenage years or early adulthood, and it’s often a cause of great distress for parents. It’s the time when old certainties don’t seem so solid anymore, a time when we question what it is we believe, a time when those who were considered to be mentors don’t have as much influence as they once did. It can even be a time of darkness, of feeling spiritually abandoned, of drifting from our roots. And yet, this is a necessary time. Questions and doubts are not the enemy of faith. Do you remember, after the resurrection, how one of the disciples questioned? Thomas, who had not been there when Jesus first appeared to the other disciples, refused to believe that Jesus was risen until he could see him. “Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe” (John 20:25). A week later, Jesus shows up again, and Thomas falls to his knees proclaiming his belief. But do you remember that never once does Jesus condemn Thomas for his doubt, for his questions, for his “dark night of the soul”? The church has, by eternally labeling him as “Doubting Thomas,” but Jesus never does. Never once is doubt said to the opposite of faith. Unbelief, seeing and yet refusing to believe, is what is condemned in the Bible, not doubt. Questions in the dark are necessary and important, and those who study such things say the real danger is found in people who never go through times like this. “Faith, to such a person, can end up being shallow, two-dimensional—and utterly joyless.” It becomes an obligation rather than a source of life. Questions in the dark are not only welcomed, they are encouraged. God is big enough to handle even the largest of your doubts.

Only when we go through the darkness can we come out into the fourth stage of faith, which is owned faith. Owned faith says, “This is what I believe. This is my faith.” Owned faith pushes through the doubts and the questions; it doesn’t ignore them. Those with owned faith dare to confront the questions in the dark and grab ahold of the God who has always held onto them. And I believe this is where John ends up. You see, John is not content to just have questions. He sends his disciples to find out the truth, to seek answers to the voices that rattle around in his head. So these disciples go, they find Jesus, and they relay John’s question to him. And Jesus doesn’t answer them. Jesus doesn’t give them a sermon. He doesn’t hand them a book of theology and say, “Read this, and then you’ll understand.” He doesn’t teach a class, he doesn’t deliver a lecture, and he doesn’t criticize John for having questions. So what does he do?

He turns to those around him and he heals many who have diseases. He casts out evil spirits. He gives sight to those who were blind. That’s what he said he came to do, way back at the beginning. When he was asked to speak at his hometown synagogue, Jesus chose a particular passage from the book of Isaiah to read. “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19). Now, what Jesus says he was sent to do, he does. And then, he turns to John’s disciples and says, “Go back and tell John what you saw.” And while we have no picture of what happened back in that prison cell, I have to believe that John got it. Jesus was doing what the Messiah was supposed to do. He may not have been doing what everyone thought the Messiah ought to do, but Jesus was doing what his Father sent him to do. And I believe John got it.

But, regardless of what happened with John, the question and the challenge still comes down to us. What do we do when Jesus isn’t who we expect him to be? What do we do with our questions in the dark? The very first thing we have to do is to give up our firm hold on trite answers. When we don’t have the answers and we don’t know what to say, we’re tempted to give answers that are either not Biblical or hot helpful—and sometimes both! The two most common answers people often give to those who are walking in the dark is either “everything happens for a reason” or “God works all things for good.” The second one is Biblical; it’s Romans 8:28, but we yank it out of context and try to make it mean something it never meant. Paul does not say everything that happens is good. He says God can bring good out of any situation, but in the midst of the darkness we’re often not ready to hear that. A mother standing by the casket of her child does not care that good may come out of that situation and cannot see any good at that moment. A husband standing by the besides of his cancer-stricken wife cannot see any possible good that will come of his children losing their mother. Timing is everything. Besides that, Paul is more writing to assure those facing persecution that God will not abandon them in the midst of their struggle and that is actually a much more helpful word to offer, that God is there in the midst of the struggle. God has not forgotten nor abandoned those who suffer.

Then there’s this idea of “everything happens for a reason,” and the implication is that God does everything and we just have to look for the reason behind it. That’s neither Biblical nor helpful, because what kind of a cruel God do we worship who makes planes crash in the ocean, makes children into soldiers to kill innocent people, makes cancer cells grow in this person and not that person, makes a drunk driver run someone’s loved ones off the road? Several years ago, the man who was my youth leader at my home church died of a heart ailment, and at his funeral, the pastor of the church at the time tried to make sense of Dave’s death in this context, that everything happens for a reason. He tried to shoehorn Dave’s death into some greater, cosmic purpose. All I wanted to do (and this was before any sort of seminary training) was to stand up and say, “Dave died because someone at the hospital made a mistake. We can spiritualize it all we want, but that’s what happened, and I don’t believe God caused that.” We have to stop giving trite answers to people in the dark and, instead, do what Job’s friends did for the first week: just be with them. Just sit with them. Just let them know you’re there and it’s okay to ask questions. The God who is with them is big enough to handle their questions, even if they’re shouted from the darkest place they can imagine.

For those in the dark places, I encourage you to keep walking and keep asking. Jesus, at the end of his instructions to John’s disciples, says, “Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me” (7:23). The word for “stumble” is “skandalidzo.” You can hear our word “scandal” in that word. It means “to offend, to shock, to falter, to be ruined.” And Paul tells us Jesus is a stumbling block; that’s why we end up in these dark places with questions, because he does not do what we think he ought to. And that causes us to stumble. But do you know what is implied in his word here? That you keep walking. If you sit down and quit, you’ll never stumble. That is a guarantee. It’s only when you keep walking that you find you just might stumble and you might fall. But if you don’t keep walking, you’ll never get anywhere. You’ll either abandon your faith or get stuck in childhood faith. Jesus’ statement assumes that we will keep walking and that we will keep asking questions. Doubt is not the opposite of faith; doubt is an essential part of growing faith.

If you’ve been here very long, you’ve probably heard me say that, at this point in my life, I probably have more questions about God than I’ve ever had in my life, and yet, at the same time, I’ve never been more certain of what I believe. I feel like I’m somewhere between searching faith and owned faith, hopefully leaning more toward owned faith. I grew up in the church, gave my life to Jesus at Vacation Bible School and pretty much lived on the coattails of my parents’ faith all the way through high school. We were a family that “did church.” If the doors were open, we were probably there. It wasn’t until I went away to college at Ball State, an hour and a half from home, that I first remember having to really think through my faith. My neighbor in the dorm got me involved in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, and for the first time in my life I found myself going to a Bible study and really looking at the Scriptures and the stories I knew so well. After my freshman year, I was asked to lead that Bible study as well as become president of the InterVarsity chapter at Ball State, both of which I did. I am grateful for those experiences, because it began to, for the first time, give me a solid foundation in my faith.

When I went to seminary, I found my faith torn apart and put back together. That’s really the purpose of seminary, and for me it worked. As I shared recently, I came out of seminary ready to change the world, convinced that I was going to do so all on my own! While I would have told you then I had an “owned” faith, it really was more of an affiliative faith. I believed in Jesus and knew him as my savior, but I still had a faith that was relatively untested. That testing, and the questions with it, would come in the first few years of ministry as I confronted things I had never had to deal with before. Within the first few months of my first appointment, one of our college students attempted suicide. She was a lovely girl, seemed to have it all together, and came from a “good family.” Thankfully, she did not succeed, but there were many things to deal with and questions to ask out of that experience. I dealt regularly with homelessness, race issues, and, later on, matters of sexuality. I stood by caskets of people who had died too young, and watched as a weeping widow became inconsolable. I experienced friends who turned on me, people who demanded much, and times when I wanted to walk away from it all. I remember a day that was probably darker than any other, when I lay on the couch in my home and just begged God to either take the struggle away or take me away. At that point, I didn’t care which happened. And do you know what God said?

Nothing. At least, not out loud. God spoke to my spirit, though, over the next hours and days, reminding me of what he had told Paul when Paul had a thorn in his flesh: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). I didn’t get any big answers or any great revelation; I still don’t have answers to many of my questions, and I don’t always understand why God does what he does or allows what he allows. Jesus is often not who I expected him to be, and in fact, every time I read the Gospels, he turns my world upside down just a little bit more. But in the words of Mr. Beaver from The Chronicles of Narnia, “He’s not safe—but he’s good.”

So that’s my story—and I’m sticking to it! Questions in the dark are no threat to God, and neither is my doubt or yours. It’s okay. God is big enough to handle it, and we can keep walking with him even when we don’t have him all figured out. After all, as Flannery O’Connor once said, “A God you could understand would be less than yourself.” A God we could pin down and figure out would not be worthy of worship. As Kathleen Norris once wrote, we deal with our questions in the dark by continuing to worship, staying connected to the community, and allowing God to work it all together for his glory. He has not abandoned you; he is with you, even in the dark places. Hold onto that truth and keep on walking. Let’s pray.