Faith's Sticking Points
Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Jeremiah 17:5-10, Psalm 1; 1 Corinthians 15:12-20; Luke 6:17-26
Ten years ago I had a DVD player – it wasn’t even a blue-ray player. It was connected to my parent’s old television, which had a depth of about a metre. I think I was probably the last person in the UK – certainly in London – to get a flat screen TV. Anyway, this DVD player would freeze halfway through films with the message coming up “Reading”. By a quirk of fate it so happens that Reading has the most obnoxious train station in the world. If, like the Village People and the Pet Shop Boys, you’re used to ‘going West’ you will well understand the frustration of Reading train station and especially of having to change between platform 3 and platform 584 (or God help us the three most feared words in the English language “Rail Replacement Bus”) – usually involving a sprint over 3 minutes, which would be fine in any other train station but in Reading feels like you’ve got to run all the way to Swindon. And let’s not get started on Swindon, where dreams go to die. Anyway, the joke in the vicarage, watching a film, at the time, seeing that message come up, was ‘oh no, we’re stuck in Reading’.
I bring this up because Christians – and churches – frequently get stuck on a particular idea of faith, which the Gospel, and especially today’s Gospel, is trying to smash apart with the kind of mallet I eventually took to my DVD player (metaphorically). This idea of faith is in the Bible. It’s the simple and attractive idea that if you’re good, good things will happen to you. The child’s idea of justice – that the world is fair. I find it quite educative watching our three-year-old Oberon, who quite often has his little tantrums. And I get it: Last time he did x, he got a sticker. Why doesn’t he get one now? Yesterday morning he could watch paw patrol. Today he has to go to nursery. You can see why it’s infuriating. We make sense of the world on the basis of consistency – and even the best parent in the world can’t manage those expectations. And in our faith, this is concentrated by the commandment to pray. We’re even told “ask and it shall be given unto you”; and: “if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you.” That’s a big promise.
I think we can get stuck on this idea of God rescuing us in times of danger, much like a parent once did. Only it’s our faith that gets stuck, and can’t move on, when that danger, difficulty, sickness, death arrives and we don’t get rescued. And if our faith is stuck on those passages where prayer is always answered, where the wicked are punished, where the righteous die old and fat and sated with life, it will not cope with this world.
In my early 20s I went to a free church in Exeter with a huge congregation of probably 1000 people over a weekend. There were donuts. The pastor and his wife were killed in a Road Traffic Accident. When I visited a couple of years later the church had collapsed. Students were warned not to go there. It was a terrible tragedy, but from what I hear people were unable to understand theologically how this could happen. There was such a strong message of the reward of faithfulness, of the blessings of righteousness, that the faith of the community could not accommodate an arbitrary tragedy.
And if Russia invades Ukraine this week it will be a thing of evil, of horror, which we have here been praying won’t happen. Senseless, unnecessary violence which will destroy lives. Should we blame God for not stopping this one man? But what then are we to say? That God doesn’t care? That God can’t act?
What we find if the DVD has not stuck is that Scripture has a broader range of voices, especially when it speaks of suffering and the presence of God. And it’s not all reassuring, at least in the short term; but it connects with our experience; and may prevent us stamping our feet, shouting ‘this is not the God I wanted’, and walking out of church.
One description of prayer I like, is that – prayer is ‘the distance between ourselves and eternity’ Prayer is the distance between ourselves and eternity. It’s not our shopping list to God. But it’s the voicing of our desires, of our lack, of how we ourselves and our world have fallen short of perfection. Our recognition of our need for God and for justice and peace and resolution. When we pray truthfully we know our desires. The very act of prayer, even if we’re praying for something morally dubious, tells us how far we are from God. It is, as George Herbert says, ‘the heart in pilgrimage’. When we pray truthfully we find out what we’re really about. Rather than magically changing the world, prayer is first of all about being honest with ourselves, changing ourselves, and learning to be closer to God; Finding God in adversity.
If we were a ship in a storm, our prayers are our bearing – our sense of direction to the harbour of God, somewhere beyond the horizon. Our Christian discipleship is trying to close that distance – but it’s not always achieved just by getting what we want. There’s a lovely line in Hamlet where he says:
There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will.
We need to get beyond this sticking point and have a faith that can accommodate suffering in its many difficult forms.
Today’s Gospel is considered the core of Jesus’ teaching. Matthew’s Gospel places it on the mount, associating Jesus’s new teaching with that of Moses who brought the law down from Mount Sinai. In Luke’s Gospel the sermon is on the plain, where we’re on a level. He’s talking to his brothers and sisters as one of us. And he tells us what a blessed life looks like. He tells us where to find God. From the beginning: Blessed are the poor. Blessed are the hungry. Blessed are those who weep. Hearing this, does it make sense to ask “where is God” when life is dreadful? He’s telling you: Blessed are you when you’re hated. Excluded. Reviled. Defamed. Hearing this, do we still expect God to make life easy? Where is your blessing? Where is your God?
Somewhere in our heads we have muddled up God and Father Christmas and it seems to take forever to disentangle them.
When St Paul is raging at the Corinthians in the second reading – it’s because none of Christianity makes sense without resurrection. The faith is not just some self-help book to make things a little more zen. It isn’t all #blessed. Jeremiah curses those who trust in mortals, in the flesh. If Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead then the Gospel ends with terrible suffering and death, without hope. And if he’s not raised then we will not be raised and our faith is futile; in vain; we are of all people most to be pitied (most miserable).
Our God is a crucified God. We follow a man of sorrows. If we let the DVD play out the story as we move through Lent, the passion and crucifixion, is a difficult story – But it tells us that God is closest to us in suffering and death. There is no miracle in the crucifixion.
Here, again, then is a sticking point. How do we move from suffering to hope? And the worse our experience of suffering, the more difficult it will be to find that hope of resurrection. Those little devil voices of materialism, of “the science”, of “supposedly grown-up” scepticism, of childhood disappointments in things we have wanted to believe in, but have been disappointed by; All say – “resurrection? It just seems so unlikely.”
It is unlikely, impossible. But for God all things are possible. And the Church has proclaimed Christ crucified for 2000 years because Christ has been raised from the dead. And because of that we can find in our suffering, hope. We can find blessing when we’re poor, and suffering; When we mourn, and are weeping. When we are hated or excluded. But we have to let the story play to the end. We have to stay clear of Reading, and follow Christ through hardship, through the way of the cross, to arrive at the last at the Easter morning.