Here’s Hope: From Disappointment to Assurance

Matthew 11:1-6

St. John’s United Church of Christ
Greeley, Colorado
December 17, 2023
Rev. Juvenal Cervantes

In the midst of the ups and downs of life, take the exit to hope and assurance, don’t take the road of disappointment and despair.

I wonder if you’ve ever known maybe someone in your family, maybe a friend, who lost their faith, who walked away from their Christian faith.

Have you ever known someone like that, maybe you were close to that yourself? They were once professed believers in Christ, but sometimes the circumstances in their lives, took a turn that was unexpected and really didn’t know how to incorporate what they were going through. Maybe they felt that God was not there to protect them from their suffering, or their loss or their pain and they walked away from the practice of their faith.

Or maybe you know someone whose struggle with God was primarily intellectual, read books, went off to school or encountered ideas in the world that their childhood faith was not able to hold. They found themselves with questions that they could not answer and they walked away from it.

I heard about a pastor who went through some congregational struggles, family struggles and eventually walked away from his faith and wrote a book about it.

How does that happen? I’m sure it is complicated in each case and there are some things that are common in that process that often occur.

A man named James Fowler wrote a book some years ago called “Stages of Faith,” and is still often cited in studies about human development.

He was interested in how as human beings, growing up we develop a faith, what he called a “Worldview,” a way of seeing the world.

As we grow up, we are given a way of seeing the world, given a faith by important people in our lives, our parents, our teachers, our church, our culture. By the time we are teenagers we may be notable fervent about our faith, we believe the world is this way, we believe that God is this way and that Jesus is this way. We can be fervent about our faith.

And then something happens. Fowler says that we don’t get past the stage three faith, the adolescence faith and people just stay right there the rest of their lives. But for some people they go off to college or they enlist in the military or they move away from home and they live in different places and suddenly they run into ideas, and people and facts about the world that challenge that way that they’ve been given to see the world and as a consequence, they experience a kind of questioning, “Am I right?” or they grow up and experience a loss or trauma that causes them to question what they have been taught.

They sort of disassemble their faith for the first time and lay it right in front of them and have to decide, “What am I going to do with this?” It happens to many young adults and it may take several years before it’s put back together. Its put back together if there is somebody in their lives who is not threatened by all of their questions, who can sit with them and listen to them and think with them without feeling threatened that they’re asking hard questions about the faith.

Hopefully they put their faith back together and Fowler calls this stage fourth faith.

But others never get the pieces put back together, they leave them abandoned on the table like a 1000 jigsaw puzzle never finished again. They walk away, we say “they’ve lost their faith.” They reform the way of seeing the world but they factor God out of it and many of the other things they might have been taught about faith growing up. That happens.

Let’s explain this in two different ways, we’ll use two terms, we’ll explain it differently than Fowler did. The word “faith” and the word “theology.” If we think of faith as our relationship to Jesus Christ, this is our faith, we’ve come to trust in Him, it’s a relationship that has been established.

Now think of theology when we start talking about our faith or thinking about our faith or trying to understand that relationship, trying to understand God. But theology is always a human activity, it’s not divine revelation.

Theology is how we learn to think and talk about our faith and because it is a human activity it is frail, it’s fragile, it needs to be revised in time, it needs to be held lightly.

That relationship of faith something that is God-given and God-done and solid, but our thinking of our faith is a human activity. It’s really possible to think things wrongly. This is what we do. We say, “this is how God is,” and if we’re not careful, we fossilize that way of thinking, it becomes captured in stone, it is a kind of idol and God has a way of shattering idols.

C.S. Lewis said that “God was constantly destroying our image that we have of him, just when I think that God is this way, I learn something fresh about God and it shatters that image and I have to revise.

So our theology, our thinking and talking about our faith is something that we best keep open to revision, to rethinking, to learning more about because we’re dealing with an infinite God that we cannot conceive of or express by our poor little finite mind. It’s sort of like putting the Gulf of Mexico into a thimble, it just doesn’t work.

It’s possible that a person as a real solid faith, that is, a real relationship with God, authentic faith, but a very poor theology. A lot of ideas that do not correspond the way God has revealed in Christ or the way God has revealed himself in Scripture.

It is always possible that you or I have a fine theology consistent in Jesus Christ, but have no relationship with that God at all.

Clearly what we want is to have a real and viable relationship with Jesus Christ, but at the same time to be able to express that and think about that in ways that grounded in scripture, that are consistent with Christ and that it makes sense in a world that God has called us to live in. This is what we want as we grow in Christ.

One of the things that happen as we grow up is that sometimes we fuse our faith and our theology, we get them so closely connected that when our theology is challenged by something, we lose our faith, we walk away from both of them at the same time. And that is often the problem, we have a brittle, frozen theology and when it is challenged by a new way of thinking or a new idea, or something out of science or history, or something else or the event of life that come in. When our theology falls away we walk about from our faith also.

It’s important that we keep both things separate in our thinking and in our experience: our real relationship with Christ and our way of thinking and talking about it.

We often hear people say, “I could never believe in a God who…” and then fill in the blank with some horrible piece of theology. And I think, “I don’t believe in that God either! That’s not the God revealed in Jesus Christ.

But it is this fusing of our faith and our theology that is often the problem.

Doubts about God, doubts about our faith, are perfectly normal parts of our life in Christ. Let me say this again, doubts are a perfectly normal parts of the journey of faith, they’re not things we always feel comfortable talking about in church because we want to keep our faith upright, we don’t want anybody to know that we question anything in our lives. Unfortunately, at church, where it ought to be a place where we talk about things is often the place where we keep these things shut down and we don’t walk with each other through some of these questions of our lives.

They knock on the doors of our lives when the reality of our lives no longer corresponds with the expectations we form about the ways life should be for the person who walks with Christ. We expect it to be this way, life has turned this way and doubt knocks on the door.

We develop a theology, a way of understanding God and our faith that can be crushed by traumatic events in our lives and we become vulnerable to abandoning our faith altogether. Or we might live with a somewhat immature, not so well thought-out theology that gets damaged, bruised or even shattered by the facts in the world as we encounter them and we end up walking away from both our faith and our theology.

The problem is that we don’t leave enough space for our theology, our way of thinking about God to be revised along the way, for us to learn and to grow and to say “Oh, it’s not the way I thought it was, it’s more like this.” We have to be able not to be threatened, and not to be able to let our theology, our thinking grow.

So that when we find ways that we thought about God and articulated our beliefs, run up again stronger facts that challenge those old concepts, it feels like doubt, but we can hold on to our faith while we work out that revision.

John the Baptist becomes an example of those people who takes the broken pieces of his theology back to Jesus for revision because his faith was real in Jesus, but some of his thinking needed to be revised. His faith sends it back to Jesus to reconstruct his theology and to find out what is it that I’ve not understood correctly?

I think it is interesting that John the Baptist comes up twice during the season of advent in the traditional scriptures. A few weeks ago we reflected on John’s ministry of preaching and the call to the kingdom of God and preparing the people of Israel for that.

And now week four of advent jumps ahead of another experience of John the Baptist, one that has to do with disappointments and doubts that grew.

We reflected that both parents of John the Baptist were priests and they were aged when he came into the world, miraculously. His birth was announced by the angel Gabriel to his father Zachariah while his father was doing his priestly responsibilities in the temple, he told him that his wife Elizabeth in old age was going to have a child and Medicare was going to pick up the bill and he hardly could believe that and the angel said, “I tell you what, you will not be able to speak a word until that child is born and you will name him John, so for nine months, Zachariah was silent.

Eventually John was born and surely John heard those stories when he was growing up and heard about the miraculous way he came into life. John studied scriptures, God called him to be a prophet, sometime late in his life he went into the wilderness to seek God in solitude and finally appeared out of the wilderness proclaiming the kingdom of God, breaking into history, “Right now it’s happening,” he said, “The kingdom of God is at hand.”

He called people to repent, he called boldly the most powerful people of his day, he called them to be baptized in the Jordan River as a sign of that repentance. He even saw Jesus and pointed to him and said, “There’s the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.”

This is a man of faith in God. He identified Jesus as the Messiah, the one who is to come, whose sandals he was not even worthy to pick up and carry. He was a man of faith. He baptized Jesus, he saw the heavens opening, he heard the voice of God, he saw the Spirit descend on this one. But John’s understanding of who the Messiah was, his theology, was lined up with that of his culture, his Jewish culture, his religious culture. He saw that Messiah the way that he had be taught to see the messiah. The Messiah he expected, as did many of his peers, would be a person, a descendent of David, who would come and take David’s throne right away. He would have a sword on his hand and he would execute justice and judgement, Roman bodies, the oppressor, would be strewn along the roads in Palestine like the Jewish bodies had been strewn along those roads by the Roman oppressor. He would come and he would overcome and he would establish his throne and his kingdom.

That was John’s hope and expectation. When he said, “There’s the lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world,” he wasn’t entirely thinking about death on the cross, redemption from sin. He was thinking about the overcoming of evil that this one would do. The conquering lamb. That didn’t happen.

In time John was arrested by Herod and thrown in Machaerus, down by the dead sea. His imprisonment spread into weeks and then into months. There were not rumors afoot about the messiah gathering an army, mustering troops to overthrow Rome and puppet king Herod, nothing that resembled anything that resembled anything of his messianic expectation that he held and other people held, taking place, more and more think that Jesus of Nazareth might not be the coming one.

How could Jesus be Messiah and how could John be his herald if John was languishing away in prison and opposition to Jesus was growing, how could this be so?

John’s journey to disappoint wasn’t yet complete from his prison cell he could see the city limits of disappointments; he was getting close.

John’s doubt about Jesus grew deeper, he sensed that if something did not happen soon, his own life was in jeopardy and that when he conscripted a couple of his disciples who would come to visit him and minister to him, he conscripted a couple of these and said, “I’ve got an assignment for you.”

Here’s what Matthew said:

When John heard in prison what the Messiah[a] was doing, he sent word by his[b] disciples 3 and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” (Mt. 11:1-2)

“Are you the one who is to come? I thought you were.” John told them, “I want you to go find Jesus and tell them who you are, then I want you to look him in the eye directly and I want you to ask him, ‘Are you the one who is to come or should we wait for another?’ I need to know, go find him, go ask him.”

That’s a very important move in John’s life. John’s expectations were crushed, his disappointments were real, his disappointments were devastating. But he took those doubts to Jesus, that’s where he went with them.

He took his broken, fractured theology and he went to Jesus face to say, “I need to understand this better.”

It wasn’t difficult finding Jesus, word was everywhere about his teaching and preaching and healing and the crowds gathering around him. What was probably difficult was find time for discussing about his important issue. I imagine those disciples standing, just witnessing what is taking place in one of those typical days in Jesus ministry in galilee. Crowds of people gathering around, mind-boggling miracles taking place, acts of God. More than one blind man being touched by Jesus finding his sight. Man and woman and children carried to Jesus crippled but waking away by their own power, deaf people being able to hear sound for the first time. Maybe one person in the crowd might have not made all the way to Jesus’ presence before life was gone, he’d expired and Jesus spoke a word and raised him from the dead.

All of this taking place just a few yards from where John’s disciples where standing and sandwiched between these moments of miracles was this teaching about the kingdom that was so different than anything they’ve ever heard.

The kingdom of God, Jesus said, is like a little bit of yeast or leaven that is put in a loaf, but given time it expands until it fills the whole loaf, it’s like a mustard seed that is so tiny and it is planted but in time it grows into a huge tree, it starts small but it is very powerful and it eventually becomes something that permeates everything, it’s like a treasure that is buried in a field somewhere and its worth selling everything you’ve got to have that field and have that treasure.

Those teachings were puzzling and they were fascinating and they were surrounded by miracles and John’s disciples witnessed all of that and eventually they found a way forward, up to the front and got Jesus’ attention.

They posed their well rehears inquiry, “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another? John wants to know, he sent us from Machaerus, he really wants to know.”

Jesus didn’t rebuke the doubts of these disciples or of John. He knows how real and honest they were and his answer made it pretty clear that honest questions are perfectly okay with him, he can handle those as long as you don’t give up seeking the truth.

So Jesus response was pretty simple, Matthew 11:4-6.

“Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receives their sight, the lame walk, those with a skin disease are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”

Go bear witness to John. Tell he what you saw, tell him what you heard. Jesus response what kind of a coded answer.

He was alluding directly to Isaiah 35, a passage written 700 years earlier about the kingdom of God. It is kind of lengthy but listen to the echoes of Isaiah 35 and Jesus word to John’s disciples:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad; the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly and rejoice with joy and shouting. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God.

Strengthen the weak hands and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, “Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.”

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be opened; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp; the grass shall become reeds and rushes.

A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God’s people; no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.

No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there.

And the ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

That beautiful prophecy from Isaiah says, “there is a day coming, when the desert of this world is going to turn into paradise again. There is a day coming where there will be no more thirst, no more sorrow, no more sickness, the lepers will be cleansed, the blind will see and the crippled will walk and it’s going to be a new day and God’s people will be walking in a holy way.

It was a prophecy about the coming day of the Lord, the coming kingdom of god and Jesus says, “Go tell John what you’ve seen and what you’ve heard. And John will know this passage, he’ll meditate on it, he’ll understand, he’ll revise his thinking.

Matthews story ends there. Those two disciples go away and we’re not privy to that conversation at that prison cell at Machaerus when they go back to report to John. We don’t know. How did he receive it? What did he say? What did he do? We don’t see his response, so we get to imagine it, which it’s fair.

The journey from expectation to disappointment and despair sometimes a very short journey and sometimes a very direct one. But I’ve got good reason to believe that John never arrived at that dark destination.

I think he took the exit to hope. I imagine that when these students of John with their testimony, what they had seen and what they had heard and with the report of what Jesus had answered to them, John’s doubts began to dissipate like the fog when the sun rises.

He said, “Oh, I need to think about the kingdom a bit differently. I don’t understand it all yet, but he is the one who is to come.”

John’s faith was confirmed; Jesus is the promised messiah. John’s own deaf ears could now hear more clearly the sounds of the carols of the kingdom, his darkened eyes opened for the first time to see the reality of God’s kingdom dawning upon the world in ways he did not expected. It’s as if he had been crippled by his partial understanding of what the kingdom would be like and he limped along with his superficial explanation for a long time and now all of a suddenly he had he strength of soul to leap for joy even when circumstances seemed to contradict his hope.

Something dead like his old spirt was called to life and John became aware of the reality of God presence like he had never imagined.

“Go tell John the kingdom is here.” No matter how the circumstances turned out for John from this point on, and they did not turn well for John, by the way, he was beheaded in that prison. But John felt certain that God’s kingdom would eventually replace this world.

And replace the wicked rule of Herod and Caesar, and every wicked king. Eventually, God’s kingdom would change everything like streams in the desert and meanwhile it was enough for John to settle down and be part of this kingdom conspiracy as he waited for it to break forth in the world.

The journey from expectation to disappointment to despair is a short one. We believe things are and should be a certain way and if expectations are unfulfilled, we plunge into doubt and disappointment that’s when we need to revise our understanding of God, or our world or ourselves or some way to make sense of it all, otherwise we’re likely to walk away.

On the other hand, the journey from disappointment to assurance sometimes takes a while. The process to revising our thinking may not be all that easy. It may require a lot of thought, conversations and prayer, reading and rethinking. It is not an easy one. So it is important that we approach that task wisely.

I want to suggest some things. Some that are even implied in John’s story. When you find yourself in that place or someone who is, here are few things to remember:

Remember that doubt is not sin, unbelief is.

Unbelief is that willful refusal to believe God, to trust God. Doubt is something that can be remedied, that can be solved. The psalmist, the prophets, even the apostles experienced doubt, as have the saints down through the ages.

Take the doubt to god.

This is an act of faith. The psalmist took his doubt to god, “God, where are you? Why don’t you respond?” In the midst of all of that darkness, they are addressing their complaint to god. That’s an act of faith. Jesus at the cross, citing Psalm 22, cries, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?”

Stay connected.

During those times of doubt, stay connected with people of faith. It is really important not to do this on your own, don’t go so low. Stay connected to the community of people who are living out the faith that you’re struggling with.

Find someone who will let your raise the questions and look for answers without feeling threatened, someone who is secured in their own faith, who understands that doubt is a normal part of the process.

Someone who won’t feel it necessary to fix you, but who will listen.

Realize that you’re not the first.

Others have very likely raised the same question. It is interesting when people have issues with Christianity, they think they’ve come up with something. Folks, Christianity has been around for 2,000 years, there aren’t any new questions, someone has asked them already. Smart people, faithful people have wrestled with them. And it is important that you’re not the first. Find their testimony and listen to them. Let them serve as guides through these dark periods where they’ve already walked.

Practice holding your theology lightly and your faith tightly.

Be ready to revise your understanding of god or of Scripture or of Jesus Christ. Our theology is not divinely inspired, scripture is. Jesus is the word of God, but not our thinking about him. It is very possible that we’ve learned things that are just not right or not complete and it’s very possible that we’ve thought those things on our own. And if they need to be removed from the jigsaw puzzle and replaced with a piece that fits, then by all means do it. Hold your theology lightly and your faith tightly.

You may make your journey through this life and never have a moment of question or doubt, that’s possible, but if you’re one of those people that sometimes struggle with things, then you’re in excellent company. David hiding in a cave and Jeremiah in Jerusalem and John in a prison cell, Jesus in the garden and on the cross and Thomas in the upper room. All these saints offer you their testimony. Take the exit to hope and assurance, don’t stay on the road to disappointment and despair, it’s not necessary.