Sermon by Fr James Heard, Thomas the Apostle, Sunday 3rd July 2016 at St John the Baptist Church, Holland Road
Sermon by Fr James Heard, Thomas the Apostle, Sunday 3rd July 2016 at St John the Baptist Church, Holland Road
There’s a lovely phrase I read in a book entitled, Why
I Am Still an Anglican. It’s by the journalist and broadcaster Ian Hislop:
‘I've tried atheism and I can't stick at it: I keep having doubts.’
Today we celebrate the feast of St Thomas, the good old
fashion empiricist, the disciple who wasn’t afraid to express doubt. ‘Unless I
see for myself – see and touch his wounds – I will not believe.’
Many clergy love this festival because it enables them to
say, well, if one of Jesus’s own disciples had trouble believing, its okay if I
openly express having doubt. I am surprised that people’s surprise when I
express this – ‘but don’t you believe wholehearted, with 100 per cent conviction?’
some people ask. What I try to affirm is that good healthy religion is one that
is unafraid to question, doubt, test and explore.
I talk to a lot of people about faith and belief, and a
question arises that can be distilled to this: What do I have to believe
to be a Christian? Many wonder that if they find a particular part of the creed
difficult to believe does that mean they are not Christian? Perhaps this focus
is because of our culture’s preoccupation with epistemology – the theory of
knowledge – and, following Descartes, striving for indubitable rock solid
foundations for belief.
Belief is, of course, important but its only one
dimension of being Christian. And it’s important to recognise that there is a
sliding scale of belief. It’s rare that one person has zero faith and another
person has 100% faith. Indeed, one person’s beliefs can often fluctuate
throughout life.
I realise that some people describe coming to faith as
‘seeing the light’, as though a light switch was suddenly turned on and everything
suddenly becomes vibrantly clear. For many of us faith isn’t like that. One
person I spoke in my research on conversion described how faith is ‘more like a
dimmer switch that is gradually turned up’. And, as we discovered in our course
on the Christian mystics, faith can also have profound periods of darkness, the
‘dark night of the soul’, as its been referred to.
Returning to the creed and belief, I wonder if you feel a
sense of cognitive dissonance when it comes to saying the creed Sunday by Sunday
– what do you do if you aren’t sure what you think about certain parts of it.
‘Born of the Virgin Mary, rose again on the third day, descended into hell...’
I wonder what we all think of the creed?
Saying the creed is a communal affirmation. It’s the faith
of the church – regardless of how we might feel on the particular Sunday
evening it’s said. This places a distance between the faith of the church and
the state of mind or heart of the individual.
When I was a curate at All Saints Fullham we had a session
for those wanting to get confirmed called the ‘Creed deed’. We cut up the creed
into sentences and discussed the bits we like or found difficult/ challenging.
The issue of resurrection came up, some on the course finding it unnecessary or
difficult to believe. But there was a lady there who had cerebral palsy who
said, ‘That’s the most important part of the creed for me’. Why... ‘Well, look
at me?’ she said. She was incredibly bright, but she spoke and walked with
great difficulty and her hope was that one day, in another dimension beyond
this life, she would be whole. Elements of the creed some people find difficult
to believe might be the very they that offers to hope to others.
In sum, if faith belongs to the Church – across space/
time – then we can proclaim it with confidence, without making everyone feel
that they need to sign up to every word before they call themselves Christian.
In fact, a healthy understanding of church means that we can with confidence be
a welcoming community to those who are seeking, the unbeliever, the casual
wanderer in... and feel they are an integral part of the body, because the
faith is the whole Church. It’s not the sum total of the individual belief of
the people who happen to be present on a particular day.
Despite the challenges to religious belief, I constantly
meet people who are searching, asking questions. Many are unsatisfied with a
purely materialist consumerist life. Whilst less people are attending church,
many so-called secular Brits express a yearning for the divine, an unquenchable
desire for some melody from ‘beyond’.
Many find themselves attracted to the benefits of faith:
the uplifting sense of openness to beauty and goodness, and the trust that our
best and deepest aspirations in life are not arbitrary flailings around in the
dark – in a completely meaningless universe – but are part of the quest for, as
Wordsworth put it, ‘God, who is our home’.
So how does faith come about? With church attendance
declining, it’s important to ask how might faith be inspired, nurtured,
encouraged. It seems impossible to force belief by sheer will power. And yet,
as Blaise Pascal observed, there may be indirect ways that faith might take
root, germinate… going regularly to Mass, hearing the choir transcend us to
another dimension, singing hymns, being inspired by the beauty of the building.
Pascal was pointing to the idea that becoming a believer is partly an emotional
matter not just an intellectual one. In fact, the reasons often lag behind the
emotions. The mystics constantly affirmed that God isn’t something that can be
defined philosophically or analysed through the intellect.
Immanuel Kant spoke of a twofold sense of ‘awe’: the
wonder at the vast splendour of the starry universe that we inhabit and to
which we respond to with wonder, joy and gratitude. And the wonder at the
compelling power of the moral values that call forth our allegiance… to care
for those in need, to respect justice. The point is that the deep and
widespread yearning of the human spirit for truth, beauty and goodness cannot
just be swept aside as some kind of irrelevant emotional ‘noise’.
The dynamic of faith is that it transcends words. It
cannot be forced, guaranteed or controlled – it comes in mysterious,
unpredictable ways and through diverse channels. It’s something that cannot be
pinned down, manufactured and it is different for different people,
personalities and temperaments.
Along with St Thomas, we are invited to walk a new path
of faith. A path that doesn’t include a smug self-confidence about one’s
superior beliefs, no arrogant claim to have done better than science, no
exclusivist triumphalism over those with different persuasions and on different
paths. It’s a path that is unafraid to question, doubt, test and explore. It’s
a scarier more open path that is willing to embrace mystery and paradox. And
it’s a path we are invited to walk with compassion, forgiveness, patience, and
generosity.
Perhaps our prayer can be that our lives and our words
carry the fragrance of that other shore – the scent of eternity breaking
through in the everyday – in our daily lives, in the welcome and care we show
in our church and in the communities which we are here to serve.
Reference: Why Believe, John Cottingham