Community of Loving Doubters

Listen: “Ulysses” by Josh Garrels

I’ve been meditating on the Easter theme of death and resurrection over the forty days of Lent and Holy Week of 2023 largely because I was teaching a series on Holy Week in a church for the first time in five years. After delivering Easter Sunday messages for over three decades, I took a five year unplanned hiatus—more like a personal crash course in death and hoped-for resurrection.

It’s been a bit surreal. For the first time in my life, I was preaching Easter after a major life meltdown, a trip to rehab, a divorce, a loss of career, a financial collapse, and a serious bout with deep doubt and darkness in which I questioned everything I had ever believed. For the first time in my life, I felt more at home with dark Friday and Saturday of Holy Week than I did with Resurrection Sunday. Jesus’ words from the cross when he quoted Psalm 22–“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me”—were more than just a reference in history for me now. I had felt those words, prayed those words, even screamed those words. And I wasn’t sure if anyone was listening.

This Easter season I was speaking from a place of—to borrow a title from one of Brian McLaren’s books—Faith after (and with) Doubt.

I took comfort in one of the resurrection appearances in Matthew’s gospel because it says: “The the eleven disciples left for Galilee, going to the mountain where Jesus told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him—but some of them doubted” (Matthew 28:16-17; NLT). The disciples had abandoned Jesus in his darkest moment, but now they are being reassembled in their brokenness and doubt—a loving, broken, humble, vulnerable community of doubters.

In the course of these last five years between Easter 2018 and Easter 2023, I have sat in groups with alcoholics and addicts of all sorts, with people who have lost their faith, with people who never had much faith, with people who have found faith, and with people who still struggle with faith. I have also met one-on-one with hundreds of people who have done a hard exit on church and any type of organized religion.

A couple of things stand out to me. Most people still desire to nurture their spirituality in some type of authentic community which practices honesty, humility, and vulnerability; where dogmas and judgments are diminished; and where doubts, questions, and disbelief are valued as part of the spiritual journey.

As I prepared for my messages on Holy Week for the first time in five years, I did a deep dive with a first century historian/Jesus scholar, John Dominic Crossan, by reading two of his books—The Last Week: What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus’s Final Days in Jerusalem and Resurrecting Easter: How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision. I found myself wishing I would read these books when they were first published.

In Resurrecting Easter, Crossan demonstrates how the Western church tradition (Catholic/Protestant) has most always depicted the resurrection of Jesus as a solo flight into heaven. (Throughout most of church history, most people could not read or write. Theology was expressed through paintings, called icons. Icons functioned like movies before the printing press, radio, television, movies, and social media existed.) However, the Eastern church tradition (Eastern Orthodox) has always depicted the resurrection of Jesus as a community event on earth. The East paintings of Jesus’ resurrection depict Jesus grasping the hand of Adam and Eve, who represent humanity, as he comes out of the grave. In the East, resurrection is always a community event, not a solo event.

A friend of mine from the recovery community made a comment after reading my previous blog entitled “Resurrecting Faith.” He said, “Fred, we have been brought back from hell and sure death to give back what we got in the rooms of AA.” I thought, how true. That’s the deep truth of the Easter message of death and resurrection.

Our sorrows, failures, pains, sufferings, doubts, and darkness must be shared in a loving community of humble doubters who have gone through hell and been brought back from the dead. We can’t do it alone. Resurrection does not happen as a solo flight. The West got it wrong. You are never alone in your deepest episode of darkness if you allow yourself to be “broken open” in honesty, humility, and vulnerability in community, with other people who have wrestled with the same type of darkness and sorrow. It’s in community that we find hope. We are brought back from hell and sure death together.

Shalom

©realfredherron, 2023