September 14, 2025
I Believe. Help My Unbelief.
Mark 9:14-29
Habakkuk 1:1-4, 3:17-19
This fall, our sermon series is called Making Room for One Another. It’s part of a theme this year about living into the welcome of Christ. So far in this series, we’ve thought about making room for people, for different generations, for strangers, for each other in this growing congregation. But our subject for today is a little different: making room for questions.
When we make room for questions in the life of faith, we make room for faith to live, and for God to meet us in the wrestling. Let us pray.
I have a hunch that most of our faith questions – certainly our most urgent ones – do arise not from intellectual doubts. Instead, they come from having a lively faith. In other words, our most urgent questions come, not from intellectual speculation about God, but from lived experience in the world.
These questions arise because we believe – or want to believe – in a good, and loving, and just God.
And at the same time, we care deeply about the world in which we live and the people in our lives, and we feel the pain.
When we pray for healing and the person we love gets sicker. When we work for justice and wrongs continue or grow stronger. When we believe in dignity of all people and witness the degradation of our public life, the violence we do to one another.
Believe it or not, I planned this topic for today in May, because I believe questions are important to a healthy faith and a healthy church. But the events of this past week, and the fragile feeling in our nation, make it seem more urgent.
The assassination of a conservative activist, whose life was precious irrespective of his opinions; followed by another school shooting in Colorado on the same day.
Our public life feels like a TV thriller. We have seen attempted assassinations, the murder of elected leaders in Minnesota, the kidnapping of one governor, the bombing of another governor’s home. Our kids go to school and practice active shooter drills. Parents get text message alerts about lockdowns. College students are landing in intensely polarized campuses, creating young people who believe that violence is an appropriate way to handle disagreements.
How is it that our political life has turned so dark? How long will we tolerate a culture where children can’t safely attend school? How much of this must go on before we have had enough and change our ways?
Questions like this don’t arise from a weak faith—they come from faith that takes seriously God’s call to be peacemakers and community-builders in a world that seems to prefer violence.
The gospel gives us language and permission for this experience of faithful questioning. In Mark chapter 9, we encounter a father whose simple faith has collided with harsh reality.
His son suffers from a condition that leaves him convulsing, often throwing him into fire or water. The father has brought the boy to Jesus’ disciples, but they can’t heal him.
Up to this point in Mark’s gospel, faith seemed straightforward—people reached out to touch Jesus and were made whole. It was simple. But there is a turn in chapter nine, and faith has become harder, more demanding, for the disciples and for the man.
When Jesus arrives, he finds the disciples defeated, the crowd impatient, and Jesus himself is exasperated. You can feel the tension in the scene. At the center of it all is a desperate father.
His prayer to Jesus captures perfectly the desperate experience of being at the end of your rope, all out of options: “If you are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.”
He says it with a not much confidence and maybe even a shrug.
Jesus pushes back, sort of playfully, I think: “If you are able! What’s this “if” business? All things can be done for the one who believes.”
And this puts the father on the back foot. What can he say? There are probably many things he wants to say, but he reaches for honest desperation: “I believe; help my unbelief!”
His prayer gives voice to an honest faith. When we are caught between what we believe about God and what we see around us. When we trust in God’s goodness, and see that bad things, and sometimes even awful things, happen to good people. When we sing about God’s victory over evil and promise of new creation, and yet evil seems to multiply.
Honest faith has questions. The father in this story, in his rejoinder to Jesus, shows us that this tension isn’t a sign of a weak faith; it’s what faith looks like in the world as it really is.
This is not new. The father who came to Jesus stands in a long tradition of biblical faith that wrestles honestly with God. Scripture shows us that the people who walk closest to God—the prophets, and Job, the psalmists, even Jesus—are often the ones who ask the hardest questions.
If we look at the scriptures, we see that questioning isn’t the enemy of faith; it’s what happens when faith takes God and the world seriously. There is room for “Hallelujah!” and for “How long, O Lord?” Both are held within the life of faith—and especially in prayer.
Lament is the form of prayer where honest questions become hard conversation with God, believing that God is actively in this world with us.
The prophet Habakkuk expresses this perfectly. His questions could have been written this week.
The more I read Habakkuk this week – a book with which I was very unfamiliar – I was taken aback by how fresh his words are. The oracle begins with the cry of someone whose faith has led him to care deeply about his nation, and to grieve that the progress they had made toward peace was coming unraveled.
Listen to these words:
O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not listen?
Or cry to you ‘Violence!’
and you will not save?
Why do you make me see wrongdoing
and look at trouble?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
So the law becomes slack
and justice never prevails.
The wicked surround the righteous—
therefore judgement comes forth perverted.
What trouble is Habakkuk facing? The historical setting is hard to puzzle-out, truthfully we know very little about it. Through the generations this prophetic text has given voice to persistent human experience. In many different ages, it has helped people understand the times they are living in.
Here is how the presbyterian scholar Betty Achtemeier interprets what is facing Habakkuk:
[He] “faces the dilemma that has confronted faithful people in every age—the dilemma of seemingly unanswered prayer for the healing of society. The prophet is one with all those persons who fervently pray for peace in our world and who experience only war, who pray for God’s good to come on earth and who find only human evil. But he is also one with every soul who prayed for healing beside a sick bed only to be confronted with death; with every spouse who has prayed for love to come into a home and then found only hatred and anger; with every anxious person who has prayed for serenity but then been further disturbed and agitated.”
We are one with Habakkuk. We pray for our communities and schools to be places of safety and mutual respect, and instead we see political violence and school shootings.
We pray for wisdom for our leaders, and instead we see a culture where leaders fan the flames and violence becomes acceptable if it serves our political ends. We pray for the healing of our national divisions, and instead we watch empathy decrease and dehumanizing language increase.
Habakkuk’s lament resonates across nearly three millennia because it emerges from the heart of someone who knows God’s vision for justice, and it is precisely the absence of this justice – the law becomes slack – that grieves the prophet and opens up his questioning cry of “How long!”
And yet… something profound happens between the prophet’s opening lament in chapter 1 and his closing thoughts in chapter 3. His circumstances have not changed. He ends in the same world where he started. The wicked still prosper while the righteous suffer. And yet.
Habakkuk makes a choice that we might call the “and yet” mode of faith.
Listen to how he puts it:
“Though the fig tree does not blossom, and no fruit is on the vines; though the produce of the olive fails and the fields yield no food; though the flock is cut off from the fold and there is no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will exult in the God of my salvation.”
I’ve learned in my own spiritual journey that this “and yet” faith can be powerful, but can only be genuine if it’s been forged through honest questioning.
The hymn we sang to the open the service includes one of my favorite lines ever written for a hymn: “and whether our tomorrows be filled with good or ill, we’ll triumph through our sorrows and rise to praise you still.”
Yes, we shall: but we must feel our sorrows. We must make room for our questions.
If we step over the wrestling, if we brush past the lament, if we stifle questions, we turn genuine faith into mere stoicism dressed in Christian language.
The real work for me has often been right here—taking time to wrestle with sorrow, to feel deeply the disjunction between the world as God wills it and the world as it is.
Where Habakkuk takes us is not to passive resignation, not to a fatalistic shrug that mutters “whatever will be, will be.” We see here an active choice to trust God’s goodness even when all the evidence is to the contrary.
Habakkuk chooses to rejoice, chooses to keep faith, not because his questions have been answered, but because he has found something unshakeable in God’s faithfulness.
Many souls throughout history have joined Habakkuk’s song of defiant hope.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from his prison cell just before he died, laid hold of this faith. He wrote, “By good powers wonderfully hidden, we await cheerfully, come what may.”
The great English poet William Cowper – a man who suffered profound doubts, who was institutionalized for mental illness – reframed Habakkuk’s words in immortal verse:
“Though vine nor fig tree neither their wonted fruit shall bear, though all the field should wither, nor flocks nor herds be there; yet God the same abiding, His praise shall tune my voice, for while in him confiding, I cannot but rejoice.”
As I was preparing this sermon, I found myself reading a commentary on Habakkuk from the classic Interpreter’s Bible series from the 1950. It was a copy that belonged to my parents when they were in seminary, and I never read that commentary. But the resources on Habakkuk are thin, and I was desperate.
The insights I read there were so profound and deep that I kept thinking, “Who wrote this? This is so good!” It’s buried in volume 6 of a anonymous sounding commentary!
When I finally checked, I was shocked to discover Howard Thurman wrote the commentary on Habakkuk—the great African American theologian and mystic who understood more than a little about living faithfully in a violent and unjust world.
Habakkuk was a hero of his faith.
Thurman wrote: “Back of all the outcrying against evil, back of all the protests, lies a conviction that rejects evil as ultimate. This assumption is present all through the utterances of Habakkuk. The deep confidence that life will not finally sustain evil is part of the distilled wisdom of the human race, and the door of hope through which the generations have passed into the city of God.”
And then Thurman offers this crucial insight, reflecting on these verses from chapter 3:
“The final resting place of the religious spirit is that the basis of hope is never ultimately to be found in the course of events. Human persons are not required to wait until the stubborn and unyielding facts of life justify their faith in life. The testimony of the spirit of God in a person is the final testimony, the ultimate truth by which their steps must be guided. One’s assurance must never be at the mercy of the movement of life about us; one must find the witness of God in one’s own heart or you will never find it.”
This is where faithful questioning leads us—not to easy answers, but to lay hold of the witness of God’s spirit within our own hearts.
We do not need to wait for the news to improve before we trust in God’s goodness. We do not need to postpone hope until evil is in retreat.
We learn to lament: “How long, O Lord?”
We learn to pray: “I believe; help my unbelief!”
Such questions arise from a living faith. They deepen us. They take us to prayer. They connect us to the great cloud of witnesses who have wrestled with the living God across the centuries.
And with them: we choose to keep faith the God whose love will not let us go. We place our We place our hope, not in the course of events, but in the steadfast love of God in Jesus and the promise that God’s goodness will prevail.
When we lay hold of this faith, the spirit of God within us, strengthens us in our weakness, and gives us the courage to say, to whisper, to shout, to sing with Habakkuk: “And yet… I will rejoice in the Lord, the God of our salvation.”
Amen.
Rev. Patrick W. T. Johnson, Ph.D.
First Presbyterian Church
Asheville, North Carolina