Do FIlme DOUBT

What do you do when you're not sure?

That's the topic of my sermon today.
Last year when
President Kennedy was assassinated,
who among us did not experience
the most profound disorientation?
Despair?
Which way? What now?
What do I say to my kids?
What do I tell myself?
It was a time of people sitting together,
bound together
by a common feeling of hopelessness.
But think of that.
Your bond with your fellow being
was your despair.
It was a public experience.
It was awful,
but we were in it together.
How much worse is it then
for the lone man, the lone woman,
stricken by a private calamity?
'No one knows I'm sick. '' ''No one
knows I've lost my last real friend.
''No one knows
I've done something wrong. ''
Imagine the isolation.
Now you see the world
as through a window.
On one side of the glass,
happy untroubled people,
And on the other side, you.
I wanna tell you a story.
A cargo ship sank one night.
It caught fire and went down,
and only this one sailor survived.
He found a lifeboat, rigged a sail,
and being of a nautical discipline
turned his eyes to the heavens
and read the stars.
He set a course for his home,
and, exhausted, fell asleep.
Just keeps going on.
Clouds rolled in,
and for the next 20 nights,
he could no longer see the stars.
He thought he was on course,
but there was no way to be certain.
And as the days rolled on,
and the sailor wasted away,
He began to have doubts.
He just keeps on going.
-Had he set his course right?
Was he still going on towards his home?
Or was he horribly lost
and doomed to a terrible death?
No way to know.

The message of the constellations,
had he imagined it because
of his desperate circumstance?
Or had he seen truth once...
...and now had to hold on to it
without further reassurance?
There are those of you in church today
who know exactly
the crisis of faith I describe,

and I wanna say to you,
doubt can be a bond as powerful
and sustaining as certainty.
When you are lost, you are not alone.