There’s a fictional story of “show-and-tell” at an elementary school. The assignment? To bring something to class that symbolizes your faith.
The first child gets up and says, “I’m a Catholic, and I brought my rosary beads.”
The second goes to the front of the class and says, “I’m Jewish, and I brought a yarmulke.”
The third stands up and announces, “I’m a Congregationalist, and I brought a casserole.”
As much as I love the lightheartedness of this joke, it does make a serious point. It suggests that Christian doctrine may no longer hold a place of honor in our churches.
Many church-goers blanch at the very idea of “dogma,” or “doctrine,” thinking it a rote set of beliefs divorced from genuine faith. “Tradition” is also disparaged, and for the same reason. For It, too, appears lifeless and rote, the very opposite of a vibrant, living faith.
Then again, maybe we’re missing something.
If Christian faith is defined by our personal relationship with God, which it is, does that mean there’s no content to this relationship?
While it’s true my relationship with my wife is premised on love, it also has content. It has a history. I know certain things about her only because I’ve been with her for years, things a stranger couldn’t possibly know. Based on lived experience, I can pretty much tell you what’s true about her and what isn’t, what makes her happy and what doesn’t.
If asked, I could even write these down on a piece of paper. That’s how doctrine works. It describes in detail the nature and history of a particular kind of relationship.
As for our relationship with God, it too is premised on love, and has history and content. Christian dogma describes and details the contours of life lived in close contact with the God revealed in Jesus Christ.
Through it we learn the ways of God, and are granted the ability to discern rightly those things about God that are true vs. those that are false. Like a lavish endowment, these “facts” are written down for our practical benefit.
Of course, merely knowing and obeying a set of dogmatic assertions, without a heartfelt love for God, is surely misguided. Jesus’ main criticism of the Pharisees, in fact, was precisely this. They lived by the rules of the faith without cherishing the heart of it.
So if, as I’m suggesting, knowledge of what is true about God matters, why is there so little discussion of it in our churches today?
One reason may be that when times are good, Christian doctrine may not seem all that important. Yet when our easy assumptions about life are called into question, as they have in recent months, when our overreliance on affluence, science, and technology fails to protect us, belief becomes more than mere armchair speculation.
At the one-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, PBS ran a documentary entitled, Out of the Ashes: 9/11. The central message of the documentary was that amid such unmitigated evil faith has no real answers.
As proof, they paraded a bunch of bewildered religious leaders before the cameras, each solemnly lamenting that, under the circumstances, doubt was about the best religion can offer.
Apparently, they subscribed to the notion that God has promised us a trouble-free existence, that bad things should never happen to good people.
And yet, paradoxically, adversity is at the very core of biblical faith. It’s its mother’s milk, so to speak.
In other words, if everything in life were already perfect and we were all blissfully self-sufficient, why would we need a savior? Why salvation of any sort?
Judeo-Christian doctrine is clear. Sin, evil, and, yes, adversity do exist. We live in an imperfect world. Yet Christianity does not leave us bereft. It offers the Good News of God’s unconditioned response to all of life’s unavoidable travails.
As Christians, we shouldn’t be surprised by adversity. We should expect it. Which is not to say we welcome it. There’s a difference.
A friend once argued in a sermon that if Christianity is all about suffering, it should be rejected. In this he was correct. Christians do not go looking for adversity or seek it in order to feel pious somehow. Yet when adversity does touch our lives, as it surely will, Christian doctrine assures us of the saving consolations of our loving God.
As such, this past Holy Week, I was surprised that so many of my former colleagues intentionally avoided Jesus’ passion altogether. After all, the whole point of Holy Week is to honor Jesus’ sacrificial suffering and death on the Cross, not to avoid it.
At the beginning of the week, I received an email from a local pastor announcing that he wouldn’t be talking about suffering this year because of all that had happened over the last couple of months. We’d had too much of it already, he explained.
True to his word, at the Maundy Thursday service days later, he pointed out how Holy Week is an affront, how it offends with its stark depiction of suffering, violence, and death, and how difficult it is for us to relive these experiences – all of which is true. As pastor, he wished to shield his congregation from adding insult to injury.
Yet why does the Bible insist they we know something about Jesus’ passion? All the gospels focus on it. It must be important, something we ought to pay attention to.
I’ve long noticed that when adversity strikes, our culture seems to adopt a white-knuckle, whistling-past-the-graveyard, “don’t worry be happy” stance. In so doing, it skips over the theological importance of Jesus’ pain and suffering – and ours as well.
The pastor’s Maundy Thursday sermon argued that since we know how the Easter story ends, that Jesus’ resurrection is right around the corner, we needn’t spend a lot of time focusing on his passion. He likened the passion to an airplane encountering momentary turbulence before landing safely. No need to worry.
And as much as I appreciated his desire to protect his congregation from undue concern, it all sounded to my ears more like ancient Stoicism than the Christian gospel.
I thought of a book I read a while ago, written by Martin Marty, noted Christian author and former religion professor at the University of Chicago. It is entitled, A Cry of Absence: Reflections for the Winter of the Heart.
Marty wrote it in the aftermath of his wife’s struggle with cancer and her subsequent death. It’s similar to an earlier classic by C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, also written after the death of his wife.
In the first chapter, Marty relates a surprising yet touching moment between him and his wife. As it was, each night they would take turns reading aloud one of the Bible’s 150 psalms.
This particular evening, after an especially grueling day of extreme pain and exhaustion, Marty was tasked with reading one of the bleakest psalms, replete with talk about death and abandonment (not, mind you, an uncommon theme in the Book of Psalms!).
Marty immediately fell silent. He told his wife he couldn’t do it, couldn’t read something so bleak, so utterly devoid of hope. Her response shocked him. Please, she begged, please read it. I really need to hear it tonight.
Her reaction seems to make no sense. Why would anyone in terrible pain want to hear an account of deep anguish and despair?
Yet it reveals a hidden truth about suffering, a paradox really. It tells us that sometimes, in moments of suffering and despair, what we really need is not so much a pep talk assuring us that everything will be OK, but the comforting knowledge that someone else out there truly understands what we’re going through, that we are not alone.
As a devout Christian, Marty’s wife believed in the promise of the Resurrection, that eternal life for her was assured. But what she needed in that singular moment was someone to share her suffering. She needed deep companionship, not happy-talk or a stiff upper lip.
There’s another story I read years ago that makes a similar point. It involves a young boy whose mother would pick him up every day from school. One afternoon she arrived at the appointed hour, but he was nowhere to be seen. After about 15 minutes or so, he finally came running out to the car.
“Why are you so late?” his mother asked.
“A girl in class dropped her pottery jar,” he answered.
“So you stayed to help her pick up the pieces?”
“No,” the boy explained, “I stayed to help her cry.”
An unavoidable truth of life is that pain and suffering are things we all experience at some point or another. No one is spared.
But the worst of kind of suffering is the feeling of loneliness and abandonment, of being cut off from life. In such moments, what we need is permission to feel the way we do, to know that what we’re going through matters.
Holy Week is designed to be our guide during life’s difficult moments. The Good News it reveals is that Jesus, both God and man, knows and understands the very worst of human suffering. As such, no human experience is foreign to God or beyond God’s providential care. God is not, in other words, some distant, unfeeling entity who looks down on our suffering as an unmoved observer.
The heart of the gospel is really this: God is with us always (“Immanuel”) and in all circumstances. Thus, we need not fear. We need not pretend, need not run, need not hide; for the God of Jesus Christ has promised to catch us when we fall; to redeem and save us, not just in the life to come but right here, right now.
Embodying these truths, Christian doctrine serves as our roadmap in times of trouble, times when no other help readily avails itself.
For when adversity strikes, the past, the present, and the future can seem eerily foreign to us. New realities and alternate truths vie for our allegiance. The settled ways we’ve come to depend on are called into question. In the wilderness, everything seems up for grabs.
Here ancient Israel is instructive. Whenever, that is, Israel found itself in the midst of hardship and uncertainty, it recalled its sacred history. It remembered times past when all had seemed lost, when the people had become disoriented and afraid. It also remembered how, in desperation, it had called out to Jahweh, and how Jahweh had rescued them and restored their fortunes, Exodus being the foremost example.
Christian doctrine serves much the same purpose. It reminds us of God’s faithful and steadfast care for God’s people throughout the ages. It places our seemingly unique experiences of loss within the context of those born by our ancestors in the faith. In this we are able to find our bearings, rediscover the timeless wisdom and insight born of the church’s historic witness, and discern otherwise hidden spiritual markers to guide us on our way forward.
So, no, the lesson of 9/11 is not that doubt is all religion has to offer. Rather, based on orthodox Christian doctrine, it is a call to discover a deeper, more searching faith, like that of Job’s, one that honors suffering rather than avoids it, that fathoms the depths and riches, indeed the very mysteries and blessings, of a faith that knows both joy and sorrow. What ultimately emerges for Job, and for us, is a more mature faith, one based not on mere sunny optimism, but on a hard-won trust that perceives God’s saving grace even in the midst of the whirlwind. Amen.