Take the bible for instance. It is hard to believe that the Earth was created in just six days; or that David defeated Goliath with only his sling and five small stones; or that the Hebrews crossed the Red Sea on dry ground, while Pharaoh's troops were drowned in the same sea as they pursued them. There isn't a whole lot of scientific evidence to support these stories.
When we get to Jesus, the Virgin Birth is a bit tough to swallow, and the miracles are certainly a bit suspect. The Resurrection that we all celebrate with such joy is an elusive thing at best. How many of us have ever actually seen one? Doubt is endemic in all of us, we fight it all of the time. The people who don't doubt are sometimes a problem for me. I know folks who seem to work religion into just about every conversation. They want to know my beliefs before they know me. They are so certain of their faith and about what God wants, that sometimes they overwhelm me with their pronouncements, and I don't like that at all. I would like it if they would doubt a bit more and not be so certain about everything. It is the certainty that turns me away; because things, I think, are more misty than that. There are always clouds around our certainty. That is why we have our doubts.
But look a bit more closely at the bible and the stories that it tells. God's miraculous creation of the world was to make it perfect after his own image. The elegant description in Genesis about the creation is almost breathtaking. God created the earth, the seas, the skies, the sun and the moon, the fish and the wild animals to give the earth what it needed to support life. God then created humans to be the stewards of this creation; to take care of it and make it prosper. Our dominion over the world is not something that we doubt, it is something that we celebrate. Sometimes we celebrate it even to our destruction.
But the story is true about the creation. I still don't know about the six days, but the truth is that God created us to take care of this world. What entered the picture was our own hubris, our own greed. We began to think of ourselves as God and lost our respect for the creation that had been given to us. That is what has brought us such distress in terms of endless wars, many of them fought in the name of the religion that we hold so dear. When you think about it, every one of our religious denominations is a point in time when we had profound disagreements with each other.
More recently, we find ourselves under the threat of global warming and of the pollution that we have so incredibly spread across our environment. We all know this, we don't have to be lectured about it. Many of us try hard to do something to alleviate the mess around us. We collect newspapers, clean up roadsides and recycle as much as we can. We are trying to live up to what God expected of us originally in creation, even if our greed and our hubris frequently get in the way.
But it isn't the sin that we need to focus on, the sin is forgiven. Where we need to spend our energy is on the mission on which we have been sent; to be stewards of the creation, and to help our fellow humans understand our role in what God has created. Because God didn't simply stop with the creation. God recognized that there was and continues to be something radically wrong with all of us, and he set out to do something about it. That is why the story of the Ten Commandments makes so much sense, even if we can't quite keep them. When that didn't really work so very well, God sent the prophets. Nobody listened to them either, so God finally sent his Son to become human, to become one of us. He came to live like us, to walk with us and to give God some sense of what it means to be human. That story, I believe is one of the most awesome things about our God.
The story of the Incarnation is remarkable. To understand humanity, God came to earth to walk in our flesh and to know what being human feels like, and why we are so difficult. God came to be one of us to gain some understanding of what sin is all about. God also came to understand something about doubt.
The Trinity Sunday Gospel has always been a favorite of mine. This is the final paragraph of the Gospel of Matthew. The resurrection has happened, Jesus told the women to tell the disciples that he would see them in Galilee. The eleven disciples came to the foot of a hill in Galilee and listened to Jesus as he gives them a kind of a farewell address. Listen to the words of that Gospel:
The eleven disciples made their way to Galilee, to the mountain where he told them to meet him. When they saw him, they fell prostrate before him, though some were doubtful.
Though some were doubtful! Doubtful? Where does that come from? These disciples had just witnessed the resurrection and had come to Galilee to see their Lord. Why would there be any doubt? There is doubt for the same reason that the pharisees refused to believe that the man born blind had been healed by Jesus. This just wasn't something that any of them had ever seen before. The disciples were humans, just as were the pharisees. There had to be some kind of a catch.
But there was no catch here. The resurrection was real, and their Lord was standing before them. He gave them their assignment:
Go forth therefore and make all nations my disciples; baptize people everywhere in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.
That is why we read this Gospel on Trinity Sunday. Making all nations disciples of Jesus, that is the assignment from our Lord. St. Francis of Assisi told his followers to "preach the Gospel, use words if necessary". What Francis was asking of his followers was to go out and to be examples of the Gospel. To show the world the power of God's love by the way that they lived their lives. Not to berate people with the "oughts and shoulds" of preaching. But to simply live the life of followers of the Christ as an example to the world. The point being that when people saw the Love of God reflected in the lives of St. Francis' followers, they would understand the power of that love and reflect it in their own lives. In truth, that hasn't worked out very well, has it? Our hubris and our arrogance have frequently taken us away from that Love and intrigued us with certainty.
But that doesn't change our mission. Loving one another as Jesus loved us is still what we are supposed to do. That means loving one another, even when we don't particularly understand or even like one another. Giving one another the benefit of the doubt when we disagree.
Our diocese of Pittsburgh has gone through a terrible time of division. We have at this moment in time many parishes that are stranded in certainty away from the rest of us as we all struggle to put this body of Christ back together again. We will be able to do that to the extent that we are able to love one another, to care for those who have left and to refrain from harsh judgement. That isn't easy, but it is the way that we are directed by the Gospel that stands so clearly before us.
