6/21/64

Scripture: Read Mark 9: 14-29

Three disciples, Peter, James and John, were coming down from a mountain where they had gone with Jesus. It had been an extraordinary experience for them. Mark says that, while they were up there, Jesus had been “transfigured” before them. It was mysterious to them - something that they hardly understood. And it was wonderful. They had wanted to stay up there and build some kind of monuments to the event.

But that was not the thing for them to do. If a vision on a high point is any good, it is something to be made real from the low ground. When your best friend says, “I’ve got a wonderful idea,” you are interested, perhaps in its “wonderfulness” but almost immediately in whether it is something that can be put to work. Well, those disciples and their master were soon to be at work again.

Coming back from the inspiration they had felt on the mountain, they found other disciples in the midst of a crowd and involved in an argument. It seems that some of those disciples had tried to bring healing to an unfortunate lad who was much afflicted. They had not been successful, and now some scribes were arguing with them.

As Jesus approached, some of the crowd came to him. One of the crowd was a man who spoke up. “Teacher,” he said, “I brought my son to you.” Then he went on to describe the boy’s malady. He went on: “I asked your disciples to cast it out [they all thought it was some evil spirit] and they were not able.”

We see that Jesus and Peter, James and John had come down quite abruptly from “the place of vision” to the “place of deed” -- the “hill of privilege” to the “plain of need.” That is the common lot of all of us.

This “plain of need” was a suffering boy and his anxious father. The “place of deed” was nothing but a hot discussion. The disciples of Jesus had not been able to help, and their enemies, the scribes, were arguing, criticizing, possibly even ridiculing and taunting them. Thus far it was just words, words, words!

But all that did not help the troubled father of an unfortunate boy. So, as Jesus approached, the father went to him. “I asked you disciples to help, but they were not able.” Then he appealed to the Master himself. “If you can do anything, have pity on us and help us.”

Jesus said, “If you can! All things are possible to him who believes.”

In the agony of his longing, hopeful anxiety, the man cried out, “I believe; help my unbelief.” And Jesus brought healing and wholeness to the lad. There is much about the story that is wonderful; there is much that is difficult. Not a few of us are moved to say about this father’s difficulty, and about our own plight: “Help my unbelief.”

That father may have been saying, in effect: “Help me even in my unbelief.” Or perhaps he meant, “Change my unbelief to belief.” Or perhaps Goodspeed catches the purpose in his translation of the incident: “Help my want of faith, as well as heal my child.”

At any rate, if it were true that confident faith could move a mountain or heal his son, that father could not bear the thought that any lack of faith on his part might fail to bring about the boy’s recovery.

For many of us, this story points up the difficulty of unbelief and the battles of faith and doubt in our own experience. One of our fellow Protestants was engaged in a lively discussion with a Catholic friend a while back. After they had talked about the resurrection for a while, it was the Catholic man who said, “Say, did you ever think that maybe it isn’t so after all, and so nothing to it?” Then, immediately, he hastened to say, “O, I shouldn’t have said that! Don’t ever let my pastor know I said that!”

He is not the only one who dares to voice his questions now and then. Dr. Willard Sperry was dean of the Harvard Divinity School for many years. On one occasion he shared the speaker’s platform with a prominent British churchman. During the discussion period the Englishman asked Dr. Sperry, “Has it ever occurred to you that the Christian religion may not be true?” To this question Dean Sperry replied, “Yes, certainly. And I do not know that I could feel I really believed in it unless at times I doubted it.”

It is no serious charge for a man to bring against himself, nor need he be ashamed to admit frankly that, for him, faith is always contending with doubt. There appear to be some blissful souls who have, once and for all, settled their doubts (or never really had any.) But many of us are, in some degree, like the man in the gospel story who said to Jesus, “Lord I believe; help my unbelief.”

In church, we speak of faith; we read about it; we sing about it. It is entirely proper that we should. We are not a society for the propagation of atheism. We are a society for the promotion of faith. But the very fact that we contend so earnestly and so continuously for faith may be an indication of our need. For some, faith is not easy nor entirely obvious.

It may be that, for many souls, the most secure faith is that which, as in Dean Sperry’s case, has honestly faced, and struggled with, doubts. For a physician to bring healing, he must know as much about disease as about health. It may be that the religious man must take account of unbelief if he is to have any assurance of faith.

Many of those who speak to us most convincingly of faith are those who have also faced most honestly the alternative of unbelief. We read in the Bible the accounts of men who speak with much assurance about faith. They are the more convincing when we know they have also considered -- even practiced -- unbelief.

In the 23rd Psalm, the writer asserts: “The Lord is my shepherd.” But in the 42nd Psalm he writes, “My tears have been my food day and night while they continually say to me, ‘Where is your God?’”

In the book of Job, we read of a man who won faith out of such sore distress that he could say, “Though he slay me, yet will I trust him.” [Job 13: 15]. Part of his most convincing credentials are also these words; “Behold, I go forward, but he is not there; and backward, but I can not perceive him. On the left hand, where he works, but I can not behold him; he hides himself on the right hand, that I can not see him.” [Job 23: 8-9].

Paul became the great missionary exponent of belief through Jesus Christ only after he had disbelieved, and violently opposed, that faith.

When Jesus was nearing the end of his suffering on the cross, he expressed his trust in God by saying: “Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit;” [Luke 23: 46], but only after he had cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” [Mark 15: 34].

To those who find faith simple and easy, let them find assurance in the Master’s assurance: “I have not found such faith, no not in all Israel.” [Luke 7: 9].

But let those who find it difficult, in whatever proportion their need, hold to the faith like the one who said, “Lord, I do believe; help me in my unbelief.” Such earnest souls are in the company of many a thinker who has had to work himself through doubts to an assured trust.

There was the prophet Jeremiah, who in one of his utterances referred to God as a “deceitful brook.” A great religious leader, Increase Mather, wrote in his diary, “Greatly molested with temptations toward atheism.” William Lyon Phelps, honored and beloved teacher at Yale University, confessed in his autobiography: “My religious faith remains in possession of the field only after prolonged civil war with my naturally skeptical mind.”

If any one is distressed at his struggle with unbelief, never finding faith easy, frequently tempted to skepticism -- let him take heart in remembrance of the company of “believers who have hammered out faith on the anvil of doubt.”

This particular sermon is intended less for those whose faith is serene enough to say, “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world” than it is for those who may be half-persuaded; who face difficulties in belied; who sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to stop worrying about the matter altogether. It might seem easier, and simpler, to (1) live like a pagan; (2) let the church get along with you; (3) keep Easter and Christmas like a secularist; (4) silence the prodding of your conscience about justice and human rights; (5) never give way to pity; (6) never hope; (7) never despair.

One reason for the renewal of religious interest in our time, for increasing church membership, for the wide reading of popular religious books, for the awakening of academic circles to theology, is that so many people in the generation in which many of us grew up did become thoroughgoing secularists -- and didn’t like it. Having tried it for themselves, all the while living more than they supposed on a standard of ethics based on inherited religious belief, they saw little prospect for their children in a world without faith in God, or devotion to Christian principles. They began to doubt their doubts.

The difficulty with unbelief is that there is so little to sustain one on his journey, no prospect except desolation ahead, no support for the best you know, no reason to suppose that the best is any better than the worst, no God whose purposes are being worked out in history and beyond history, no Christ to lift up principles that can redeem mankind, no kingdom in which to labor and serve with confidence that it will supersede the devices of this world.

After a while, mind and heart and spirit rebel against that! The mind rebels because it was made to think toward some constructive conclusions. The heart rebels because it needs a response to love. The spirit rebels because it calls out, and waits for an answer.

“‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” better to have believed too much than too little, or never to have believed at all. A vine can go not much higher than the trellis on which it is trained and supported. A human life can climb no higher than the framework of its faith. We need a “trellis.”

If one concludes that religion is the “opiate of the people,” a compensation for disappointments, only a support for men and women too weak to stand on their own feet, he sets himself outside the company of some great believers. Was Jesus “deluded” when he “steadfastly set himself to go to Jerusalem?” Was Paul deluded when he went on long and dangerous journeys, endured beatings and imprisonment, saying “In this cause I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ?” [Ephesians 3: 14].

The lives of such people, and those who have followed after them, make it hard to believe that religion is an opiate or a delusion. Something drove them, and kept them. I should suppose that we might want some of that kind of integrity for ourselves. It is not to be had by the route of unbelief.

No one of us can be indifferent to Christianity. Some may not make up their minds about it; but nonetheless they are making up their lives all the time. No matter where we take hold upon life, we come upon religious questions and face religious issues.

We can not help asking ultimate questions. What do our several pursuits mean? Is what we are doing good or bad? What is good and what is bad? Is life the result of blind chance, or does it have meaning? What is mankind? Is man animal, or is he more than animal? If he is only animal, what hope is there of lifting him out of gutter or slum?

When you go into business, or enter a profession, are your goods and services to be sold only in the highest market? Or are they a means to help your fellow men? If you enter politics, are truth and honor to be upheld, or shall they be sacrificed for the winning of an election? Is man a mere political pawn, or is he “endowed by his Creator with certain inalienable rights?”

Are governments “of, by and for the people” more nearly right about the nature of man, and his political and economic societies than Marx or Mussolini? Which is more likely to succeed and to last, because it is of the nature of things, or the purpose and will of God?

When one says, “It is difficult to believe in Christianity” we may answer, “Of course it is!” But which is harder -- to say that the earth is a “bit of star dust gone wrong” and man’s life upon it “full of sound and fury signifying nothing” --- or to say that “God created the heavens and the earth” and prepared a home for man upon the earth; endowed him with hopes dreams and visions; gave him a moral sense; bestowed upon him a capacity to love and a desire to know; gave him restlessness for better things; haunted him with ideals? There may be more difficulty in unbelieving than in believing.

But Christianity goes beyond the halfway house. Christianity affirms that, in Jesus Christ, we can see most clearly the love of God, as a Father, toward His children. At last, in Jesus Christ, we get a glimpse of God’s goodness in human form. Christianity says that we “have seen the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,” and “he that has seen the Son has seen the Father.” We choose either the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, or we choose some other. In the face of that choice, we say “To whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.”

There is difficulty in following Jesus as “the way and the truth and the life.” It has always been so. To his first disciples, he said “Take up your cross and follow me.” It is difficult to forgive your enemies and to pray for those who despitefully use you; it is difficult to do to others as you would have them do to you.

George Bernard Shaw observed that “There was only one Christian, and we crucified him.” Few of us are worthy to be called by Christ’s name. But, even when we follow afar off, many of us know that we are on the path that leads to life, and there is no other for us.

Christianity comes down to personal commitment to Jesus Christ. We interpret all things by what God purposed in him. We find life’s present meaning in him.

When we seek the God and Father of our spirits, we look for the invisible to become visible in Christ’s face. Our confidence is that “nothing shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus.”

And from a half-skeptical saying: “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief,” we come to faith saying, “I know whom I have believed.”

Amen.

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, June 21, 1964.