David Heller is a young Boston psychologist who, as part of a continuing research interest, collects letters children have written to God. “Dear God: Children’s Letters to God” (New York: Doubleday, 1987) is Heller’s second publication on this subject. In it he reports the following letter: “Dear God, I have doubts about you sometimes. Sometimes I really believe. Like when I was four and I hurt my arm and you healed it up fast. But my question is, if you could do this why don’t you stop all the bad in the world? Like war. Like diseases. Like famine. Like drugs. And there are problems in other people’s neighborhoods too. I’ll try to believe more. (Signed)Ian.” (age 10) (p.121) Who of us cannot relate to that child’s letter to God? Who has not asked the same questions? It is said that the most important questions are asked by children and philosophers, and it does seem that way, doesn’t it?
I. IMMEDIATELY AFTER JESUS AND THE “INNER CIRCLE” OF PETER, JAMES, AND JOHN, CAME DOWN THE MOUNTAIN, THEY ENCOUNTERED HUMAN SUFFERING. This narrative, commonly referred to as “An epileptic boy healed” appears in all three Synoptic Gospels...and in each, immediately follows the Transfiguration of our Lord. In all the Synoptic Gospels these events are linked: the glory at the mountaintop and the suffering in the valley. That’s the way life is, isn’t it? We may have some high moment of inspiration, but soon life brings us down to earth again.
There is a great painting by the Italian master Raphael, showing the descent from the Mount of Transfiguration. He depicts in a powerful fashion the striking contrast between the top of the mount and the bottom - above, the beauty of that high and holy vision, which we call the “Transfiguration of Jesus;” and below, the tragic need and suffering, the impotence of the disciples, and the fruitless discussion about it. So does life have its stark contrasts: sometimes we go from the beauty of worship here to find ugliness outside; we move from the peace and tranquility in church back into the turmoil in our homes, our places of work, our world. But that’s where we must go. We cannot stay here forever. Jesus took His closest disciples down from the mountaintop and back into the marketplace.
Halford Luccock in the INTERPRETER’S BIBLE comments on the phrase “going downhill.” It is usually applied to people in a condemnatory or pitying manner. When we say of anybody, he (or she) is “going downhill” we mean that that person has seen better days. But, says Luccock, “there is a nobler sense of the words as well - the sense in which Jesus spent his whole life going downhill from the high and lonely places, where he held communion with God to the level, crowded places of human need. There are those who spend much of their time on the fine art of ‘going uphill,’ climbing to some height of advantage, position, power, or wealth, and pay no attention at all to this much finer art, the art of going downhill. It is the lifelong descent from the place of vision to the place of deed, from the hill of privilege to the plain of need.” (Halford E. Luccock, THE INTERPRETER’S BIBLE, Vol. 7, New York and Nashville: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1951, 779) We all need times of escape. “Retreat” is the word which we usually use. But retreats are for refreshment. After a retreat, we are supposed to make some advance. William Barclay writes: “...solitude is not meant to make us solitary. It is meant to make us better able to meet and cope with the demands of everyday life. (DAILY STUDY BIBLE, Phila: The Westminster Press, 1956, p. 220) How often, whenever Jesus was confronted with heavy theological questions, he turned people’s attention away from the heavens, and back to their neighbors in need here on earth.
When Jesus came down the mountain, He saw a great crowd, engaged in a heated argument. When they saw Jesus, they stopped. There was evidently something about Jesus that amazed the people...perhaps his face was still shining with the radiance of the mountaintop experience, like Moses’ face after meeting God on Mt. Sinai. Jesus asked them, “What are you discussing?” There is terrible irony in this word “discussing.” In the presence of a deep and agonizing emergency, all they could do was to discuss! Have you seen the poster which enumerates a whole list of different items, sort of a paraphrase of Matthew 25? One of them is this: “I was hungry, and you formed a discussion group to discuss world hunger. Thank you.” How many times in the history of the church have Jesus’ disciples, face to face with appalling human need, been preoccupied with discussion? “Like a freshman forum, moves the Church of God; brothers, we are talking, where the saints have trod.” We’re very good at it. We Methodists, especially, have a penchant for thinking that if we have thoroughly debated something, and passed a resolution, we have done something. I know that “It is better to discuss something without resolving it than to resolve something without discussing it,” as someone has said, but there is a time for discussion and a time for action. In the face of suffering humanity at the foot of the mountain, the need was for action, not discussion.
This poor father had an “only child” (Luke 9:38) who was subject to seizures, which sounds to those who read the words carefully as an almost clinical description of epilepsy. The poor father brought his son to the disciples, hoping that they could do something about the problem. But “they were not able.” How many times that has been true down through the ages...the world comes to the doorstep of the church, and we are powerless to help. People are ground down by depression, guilt, poverty, etc., and instead of lifting the burden, sometimes we add to it...and blame the victim for his or her problems. Why were the disciples so impotent? Jesus answers simply: from lack of faith. “Faith” in the Bible means more than belief. It means “trust.”
II. AT THE FOOT OF THE MOUNTAIN, THERE WAS HUMAN SUFFERING. And the disciples were impotent in the face of it. I have felt that way many times, standing by a hospital bed, wishing that there was more that I could do, wondering why God allows good people to suffer so. Twenty years ago there came out of Korea a classic little book titled “The Martyred” by Richard E. Kim (New York: George Braziller, 1964) In it the agnostic Captain Lee comes to know Mr. Shin, a Christian pastor, in the midst of the Korean War. (Or was it only a police action? I can never keep those things straight.) In the midst of the horrors and terrible suffering of the people, Lee kept asking the minister, “Does your God care that people suffer?” And Shin for many months avoided giving the answer, out of his own despair and uncertainty as to the answer. Finally, one day, Lee corners him and says: “Shin, your God doesn’t care, does He? Your god, any god, all the gods in the world - what do they care for us? Your God, he doesn’t understand our sufferings: he doesn’t want to have anything to do with our miseries, murders, starving people, wars and all their horrors - your God couldn’t care less!” The Christian pastor, Shin, in his own agonizing unbelief cries out to the agnostic Lee: “All my life I have searched for God but I found only man in all his suffering!” But of course, had he but realized it, when he found man in all his suffering, he found God!
I know, this is not the usual way of thinking of things. Instead of seeing the presence of God in human suffering, we see instead God’s absence. Theologian Paul Tillich reported that when he toured the battlefields during World War I, soldiers most often expressed their disbelief in God in terms of not being able to reconcile the notion of a good God with the evil they saw all around them. They asked: How can there be a loving purpose at the heart of reality and the world be as it is? Albert Einstein confessed his inability to believe in a personal God along these same lines. If you could preach a sermon to those who have suffered in the world’s holocausts and hurricanes; who have lost family and friends to earthquakes, famines, floods, and plane crashes, what would you say? What message of comfort would you give to the starving, the homeless, those victimized by war, military coups, tyranny? There is only one thing I can think of to say: there is a God who suffers with us and is involved in the midst of it all. I believe that evil is a problem only for those who believe that God’s will is always perfectly done here on earth. But if that were true, how come Jesus taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done...on earth as it is in heaven?” We pray that prayer because Jesus taught us that God’s will is NOT perfectly done on this earth. But I digress. Jesus tells this agonized parent that “All things are possible to him who believes.” All things? That’s a pretty broad statement. And it must be seen in the light of Jesus’ own teaching and life. It is not appropriate to ask God to do parlor tricks. Jesus is not advocating our using faith as sort of magic for our own personal advantage. He rejected that temptation Himself, when the devil dared him to jump off a cliff and trust God to save Him. The God of Jesus Christ doesn’t do parlor tricks. Jesus rejected that temptation, and by implication, rejected it for His disciples. Jesus did not even save Himself from suffering. Robert Raines writes of the problem of suffering: “There is no answer to that question in any philosophy or religion under the sun, in nothing but Jesus Christ nailed to the cross, and he is the answer, the flesh-and-blood proof that God cares, cares so much he didn’t stay up in his blue heaven but came down to earth to enter into and take upon himself our sufferings, to share our sufferings - no matter what - all the way. The noblest fellowship on earth is the fellowship of those who suffer. To suffer is truly to care. God is with those who suffer, whether they recognize it or not.” (The Pulpit, January 1965, p.19)
III. “I BELIEVE...HELP MY UNBELIEF...” The father’s reply to Jesus tells us a whole lot about the nature of faith. His faith. My faith. Your faith. Everybody’s faith. It is paradoxical, but not really contradictory. After all, the man showed a measure of faith by bringing his son to Jesus in the first place. We have all showed a certain measure of faith by coming to worship this morning. I have no illusions that each and every one of us has come because of a fully developed, mature faith. Most of us, at least some of the time, and some of us, most of the time, are a mixture of faith and doubt. This poor fellow came to Jesus not because he had perfect faith and trust in Him, but because he was so desperate he was willing to try anything...even Jesus! And Jesus did not chide him, nor turn him away. Some of us have come to worship this morning out of desperation. We’ve tried everything else...perhaps there is help and hope here. After a period of religious agnosticism, the pendulum is swinging these days. Religion courses, even in secular universities, are filled to overflowing. Theologian Harvey Cox’s classes at Harvard are so full they can scarcely find rooms big enough to hold them these days. There is a wistful yearning and longing across the land, across the world. There’s a God-shaped void in our hearts, and we are trying to fill it. “I believe...help my unbelief!” isn’t a bad prayer for any of us at any time. There are tides of the spirit. The sea of faith ebbs and flows. Sometimes it seems easy to believe, and other times much easier to doubt. One of our problems is that we are used to taking the easy route...so we wander to and fro, pushed this way and that by whatever fad is current at the time. We are like the man who lived in the Ozarks and was having trouble getting his rocking chair just right on the front porch of his home. He would twist his chair this way and then that, rocking awhile in one place, then moving to another. Finally, his wife wanted to know what ailed him. He said, “Can’t make up my mind whether it’s easier to rock north and south with the grain of the wood or east and west with the wind.” A lot of folks are like that - they’re willing to go along with whatever seems easiest at the time. But real, deep, religious faith requires effort . There are no short-cuts or bargain-basement closeouts in faith! “I believe; help my unbelief!” These words can have at least a couple of different meanings. They can mean “change my unbelief into belief,” or “change my weak belief into stronger belief,” or “help me in spite of my inadequate faith.” (And our faith is always less than adequate.) Either way it is a prayer which we all have prayed, or need to. We are all of us strange mixtures of faith and unfaith, belief and unbelief. We say one thing in the safety of the sanctuary, but another in the daily round of life. We may stand up in church and confidently proclaim: “I believe in God the Father Almighty...” but the next day we say, “I wonder...” How do we deal with our doubts? For one thing: don’t feel guilty about them. In a sense, doubt is not contrary to faith, but a necessary ingredient of it. Without doubt, faith becomes credulity or gullibility. A lot of people think that is just what our faith is: that we are like simple country rubes walking around the County Fair starry-eyed, susceptible to every spiritual con artist who comes down the pike. That may be true of some believers, but not for those who, like our man in today’s Scripture, are courageous and humble enough to deal honestly with their doubts. “I believe, help my unbelief.” Carl Michalson says that this form of intellectual ping-pong is necessary for any of us who desire to have a mature and satisfying faith. In a classic little book by John Oman titled GRACE AND PERSONALITY (New York: Association Press, 1961) he says: “Unbelief is a sin, not because we force ourselves to believe or to suppress doubt and inquiry, but because, to some evil intent, we are insincere with God’s witness to himself. In the strict sense, we should not even try to believe; for we have no right to believe anything we can avoid believing, granting we have given it entire freedom to convince us.” Those are very important words. We have no right believing anything we can avoid believing!
William Lyon Phelps of Yale wrote in his autobiography: “My religious faith remains in possession of the field only after prolonged civil war with my naturally skeptical mind.” Some of us have been through that battle, also. We have come to faith only after a long struggle with doubt. Harry Emerson Fosdick once preached a sermon in Riverside Church titled: “The Importance of Doubting Your Doubts” taking his cue from G.K. Chesterton, who once spoke of his “first wild doubts of doubt.” Fosdick said that one comes into true faith only after getting to the point where one begins to doubt his or her own doubts! I like that! Harold Bosley, who was minister of First United Methodist Church of Evanston, for many years, said: “We never get beliefs 100% doubt-proof. We can always ask questions about them that no mortal man can answer. But life won’t let us wait around until we are 100% certain, before we must act. We must trust the Creator of life! Many times we act with no more than 51% assurance. And sometimes not even that much - but we must act in the light of the best we know.” (National Radio Pulpit, p.24, Aug-Sept., 1971) That is what we have to do. Nobody escapes faith. Everyone has to act in this world on less than perfect assurance. Josh Billings, 19th-century American humorist, said: “If there was no faith there would be no living in this world. We couldn’t even eat hash with any safety.” No one can escape the necessity of faith of some kind. The question is: “Faith in what or whom?”
This distraught man said to Jesus: “If you can do anything, have pity on us and help us!” (v. 22) And Jesus replied: “If you can!” Now, commentators have interpreted these words in two different ways. They may be taken as an exclamation of wonder that anyone could use the word “if” in connection with God’s power. Others take the words as referring to the man’s own part in the healing process. “If YOU can.” It seems as though Jesus was turning the man’s question upside down. He seems to be throwing the issue back to the man himself, saying, in effect, “It’s not a matter of what I can or cannot do; most of it is up to you. It’s a matter determined by your faith.” Taken either way they proclaim the same great truth of God’s power and the need of our faith to make that power operative. “It is mostly up to you,” Jesus seems to be saying. “I have made the power available. Now you must use it. I have come to you. Will you come to Me? Are you willing to trust Me?” Remember: in the Bible, “Faith” means “Trust.”
We began with little Ian’s letter to God, confessing his doubts. I can imagine God writing a reply to Ian’s letter, and answering it in this way, addressed to all of God’s children, everywhere: “Dear children of mine, you have doubts about Me??? I have doubts about you sometimes. Sometimes I really believe. Like when you come to church on Sunday mornings and tell Me how much you love Me. But my question is, if you could do this why don’t you stop all the bad in the world? Like war. Like diseases. Like famine. Like drugs. You think you’ve got problems, you should try being God sometime! On the other hand, whenever you’ve tried it, the results haven’t been impressive. I’ll try to believe more. Trust Me. (Signed) God.”