Faith, Certainty, and Me

 Friends, you’ve made it! It’s the final Sunday of Stump the Preacher 2025, sermons requested by you and then researched and delivered by me. A few of you put ideas in the proverbial hat that are already in the lineup for Stump the Preacher 2026! For today, the finale of Stump the Preacher, season 2025, we get Andy’s request: this question about what faith is, what doubt is, what certainty is, and which of those things I have. Well, here goes nothing.

But first, an old story, about some teacher at a college somewhere, beginning a lecture in a business class by putting a large jar on a table. He took out a bag of big rocks, and dropped them in the jar one by one until they reached the top. He asked the class, “is this jar full now?” The class nodded, but the professor said “no, it isn’t!” Then he took out a bag of gravel, and poured the gravel in the jar until the gravel filled in all the cracks between the big rocks, and reached the top of the jar. The professor asked the class, “now is the jar full?” They nodded again, with some hesitation, and he replied, “no it isn’t!” Then he took out a bag of sand, and poured that in the jar until the sand filled in the tiny crevices between the big rocks and the gravel, and it reached the top of the jar. The professor asked the class again, “is the jar full now?” This time, one student answered “probably not.” And the professor took out a bucket of water, and poured it in the jar, until the water filled in all the spaces between the big rocks, gravel, and sand, and until it reached the top of the jar. “Now,” said the professor, “the jar is full. What have we learned from this?” One smart alek raised his hand and said “that no matter how full our schedules are we can always cram one more thing in?” The professor chuckled, but replied, “No. The lesson I need you to take from this is that those big rocks have to go in the jar first, or they’ll never get in.”

Big rocks.

Faith, doubt, and certainty are complicated words. And they can be very heavy words, depending on who you’re saying them around. They were in my house, where my Christian parents got married, joined their local Methodist Church like the nice young families did in the ‘80s, one parent stayed, joined many committees, and taught Sunday School, and one parent darkened the doorway of the sanctuary once every three Easters, and then their three daughters grew up in the same house, and went to the same church, and took three very different paths afterward. These days, among those 5 people, we have a mom who still teaches Sunday School, a dad who praises the Divine when his team scores a touchdown, an atheist, a United Methodist pastor, and a UU neopagan. Same big rocks in the same jar. But very different outcomes. I’d argue that we all have more in common than not, and that the differences come down to the gravel coming from different lumber yards, the sand coming from different beaches, and the water coming from different streams. Those smaller, temporal, cultural distinctions can look like such a big deal in the here and now, and inform what you need to know in order to love a person. But in the grandest scheme of things, most of us on this mortal coil share the big rocks in common, even when it doesn’t look that way.

Faith is complicated. Doubt is complicated. Certainty is complicated. And personal. And everchanging. All I can do in this life is speak for me, and all I can say about those words is what I feel in this present moment. So, these thoughts about faith may expire at noon today, and then you’ll have to tune in next week for more.

A womanist theologian and author by the name of Renita Weems, who I’ve likely quoted from up here before, and who I will certainly quote from again, once told a room full of graduating seminarians that faith is, by definition, “living between the last time you heard from God, and the next time you hear from God. And it could be years between the last time, and the next time. But you gotta preach like you just heard from God last night.”

Faith is about the amount of power and gravitas you get in your life from remembering to lay your hands on those big rocks every once in a while. Faith is not about feeling like God is your bestie and you and our Creator skip through life holding hands. I sure don’t feel that way every day, nor have many people who we hold up as exemplary in their faith. One such exemplary Christian is Mother Teresa, canonized as a saint by Pope Francis in 2016. She felt God pulling her on the Celestial Lasso to become a nun. She did, worked her way up through the ranks and landed a relatively stable and respectable teaching position, but was so troubled by the social sin of poverty, and so called by God to address it herself, that she spent the rest of her life serving orphanages in Calcutta. You would expect a woman like that to say she had God on speed dial, but she didn’t feel that way, and when a biography came out after her death that revealed what she wrote in her diary, folks were shocked, offended, and mildly horrified. She wrote for decades on end that she felt a deep spiritual depression. Far from being on her speed dial, she felt like she texted God every day and God left her on read for a solid half century. The big rocks kept her going. Her love for her neighbor, her passion for social justice, her dedication to Jesus, and the lives she touched, those all had to be enough to get her by, from one year to the next. And they did.

Christian author Anne Lamott once wrote, “the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort.” And as usual, Anne Lamott was right. Faith is a jumbled chaos of feelings and experiences that we can hardly make any sense of in this life. It’s the chaos that Jesus speaks to in this morning’s Gospel passage from Luke, where Jesus tells us for the second time this month that faith can put you at odds with your own family. He cautions us that faith is hard, and following him comes at a cost to other priorities in your life. In order to make room in your jar for the Jesus rock, some other stuff might have to go. But also, faith is plastic. It’s bendable. It changes. And it takes the shape of the hands holding it. We hear this from the prophet Jeremiah, who shares a vision of God as a potter, who made a vessel out of clay and smushed it, and then used that same clay to make something else. We don’t gain or lose clay in this life, our faith doesn’t grow or shrink. But it morphs. It looks like a perfectly good cup, and then we decide cups don’t work for us anymore, and we smush it, and we grieve our smushed, unshaped clay, and how pretty it once was. This is part of what doubt looks like. And it’s ok, because our clay didn’t go anywhere while we were doubting. What hurts our clay is certainty. When we’re so sure we want our clay to look one way, and one way only, that we leave it in the sun, untouched, and it gets hard and cracks. We need to dab some moisture on that hardened clay, and make it malleable again. When we have malleable faith, we get curious about what else we can do with that clay, and we play with it. We could be like those kids that really like making snakes and balls out of clay, and just enjoy doing that in this life. Or we can try to build something really ornate. But at the end of the day, all that clay goes back to the same Potter. And someday, we’ll see that, whatever we built with our clay in this life, it was a tiny part of a much bigger Creation.

So, where am I? Well, I have a strong feeling about those big rocks in my jar. I put them in, and built my life around them, and they’ve gotten me through the hard times. Family, compassion, art, joy, those are my big rocks. They aren’t going anywhere. I’ve never doubted them. And I have a heart feeling about God listening to me, gently putting a hand on my shoulder to nudge me, or occasionally grabbing me with both hands and shaking me. I’ve always felt very strongly that God is a heartbeat away. But what is God like? Who is God in my world right now? That I learned quickly in my ministry to play with as much as possible, so my clay wouldn’t dry out. I’ve stayed experimental and curious. I’ve played with all the shapes my clay can make, and I’ve mashed all the colors into it to make all kinds of stuff. 

Above all else, if you struggle with the faith, and doubt, and certainty questions, I encourage you: think about what your values are, and how you stay true to them. Your values, your big rocks, say a lot about who God is in your world. Build your life around those big rocks, those priorities. And then, around them, stay soft, like clay, and bend with God. It’s a crazy journey, but we’re in it together.

Amen.