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Thought for the
Week 30 March 2008 – Second Sunday of Easter Alleluiah,
Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluiah!
Isn’t it
strange how often we call the events in the Bible by inaccurate names. Consider the Prodigal Son – it is actually
a story about a loving Father who had two sons, neither of them worthy of
their father’s love. And here’s
another today – he is not doubting Thomas at all, but believing Thomas! But
Thomas, be he doubting or believing, helps us run a quick “reality check” of
our faith. How do we do our believing? I am
always deeply concerned by Christians who claim to hear God, or the Holy
Spirit, speaking to them clearly. Often,
they are extremely devout, and highly committed Christians, living out their
faith in admirable and exemplary ways. So,
what is my problem then? In the
first place, why cannot all the other Christians, who are devoutly trying to
work out what God wants of us in this complex and increasingly materialistic world,
also hear God’s message clearly? Are
the rest of us just second-class Christians?
Perhaps some would say so, but In the
second place, how do you know that you are actually hearing the voice of God,
and not your own conscience or your own mind?
In the
third place, God is not like that. We
humans are frail beings spiritually, and cannot stand much reality. God is very gentle with us, partly out of
his astonishing love for us, and partly because He wants us to respond to Him
as an act of freewill, the freewill that He gave us for just that
purpose. He wants us to love Him, not
to be bullied into serving Him. He
does not speak in earthquake, wind or fire but in the still, small voice,
which is almost impossible to hear against the background noise of this busy
world, so full of the fever of life, which, of course, He created. To put it simply, the words of God are so
powerful, they would probably blow our fuses!
Even Moses, who got closer to God than any other human in all history,
came down from Mount Sinai with his face glowing so brightly that the
children of In the
fourth place, many of those in the past, who claimed to hear the words of
God, and have been believed and followed by many, have simply been
mistaken. Consider the Jim Jones sect
of California, and the Branch Davidians, which both came to tragic ends, or
the Jehovah’s Witnesses (who haven’t even got God’s name right), and the
Mormons, both of whom have taken the Christian story, and pushed it down
blind alleys that have little to do with the love of God. In the
fifth place, Faith is not just a private relationship between God and me (or
worse still, between me and God!)
Primarily, faith is the relationship between God and his whole Church. Man was created a social animal, and we
need to “do” faith together just as much as we need to do nearly all of the
other human activities together. A
large part of our faith is worship, and we cannot worship on our own – we can
pray, or study, or adore on our own, yes, but worship is essentially what the
gathered Christian community does. As
Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name …” The
truth is very simple, but it is not an easy truth. It is this – there are no short cuts. There is no “Cuppasoup” faith, no secret
body of knowledge waiting to have hot air added to give us instant access to
the things of God. Christians
are called to spend their whole lives struggling to enter more deeply into
relationship with God. To do this, we
need all the traditional tools available to us: prayer, sacraments, study, fellowship,
service, and alms-giving. Don’t get me
wrong here – struggle doesn’t mean it’s all grey and depressing – far from
it! This struggle is the most
rewarding way of leading your life, and you will find beauty, meaning and
truth in it, but it is not easy; it is definitely a struggle. So am I
suggesting that salvation is earned by struggle? Absolutely not! Salvation is God’s free gift, freely given,
and it is offered to all, though surprisingly few accept it. But that is only the beginning of being a
Christian. The struggle begins when we
try to respond to the love of God. For
Anglicans, our faith rests on five pillars:
Some
would argue that the Bible should come first in that list, but the fact is
that the books that make up the Bible sprang out of the teaching of the
Church, and not the other way round.
The books that we know as the Bible today were not chosen till
centuries after the Church began its teaching, and decades after the Nicene
Creed was formulated. Sometimes,
it seems that the Church will not, or cannot, hear the voice of God, but when
it becomes clear that He is at work in the world, eventually the Church has
to listen. Yes, ideally, the thinking
of the Church should lead the thinking of the world, but the Church is, in
part, a human institution, and can all too easily become set in its
ways. The concrete of the attempt to
guard the truths of God can withstand the mighty rushing wind of the Holy
Spirit for a finite period, but like the Germans in 1940, God has a way of
going round our defensive bunkers, leaving us looking rather exposed, if not
down-right silly. Very few people
today believe that the sun revolves around the world, but for several hundred
years after that position had become intellectually untenable (and Who gives
us our intellect?), that was still the official position of the Church. To take a more modern example, the world
was electing female Members of Parliament, and training female Doctors and
Lawyers long before the Church began ordaining female priests. The world
contains no end of other people’s personal experiences, but at some point,
like Thomas, I have to own the faith for myself. It is just an admirable set of ideas, but
ideas which belong to other people, until I make the faith my own. For that I need to engage my own
experiences of life, and my reason.
Self-giving love is beautiful to observe, and the story of Jesus has a
universally compelling attraction, but does it work in my life? The only way to find out is to try it and
see! Our
task then is to use these five pillars to construct our own Christian faith,
which is also the faith of the Church. The Church and the Bible give us the
skeleton, and the sacraments add muscles and organs, and our own experience
and reason contribute the brain and nervous system, and God will breath life
into our faith, as He breathed life into us in the first place. Your Christian faith should be recognisably
one of a kind with mine, and with that of any other Christian, but it will
have your own personality impressed upon it to give it colour and
individuality. The
development of a Christian faith is not a one-off event in the past; it is a
process. In the
Landing Ship, HMS Fearless, we used to have a couple of tanks that were
specially equipped with rollers in front.
The rollers contained great rolls of steel track, so that, as the tank
moved up a soft beach, it could unroll the track, to lay down a steel roadway
for other vehicles to use, following behind it. That’s not a bad model for our faith. Jesus Christ is of course the same
yesterday, today and for ever, but we are not. Our faith, if it is to have any meaning and
impact, must change, grow and develop as we do ourselves. We need to be standing on the faith that
we have already built, and at the same time, to be working on another section
to stand on next. That is
what Thomas did. He stood firm on the
faith that he had developed, through loving and serving Jesus, but as soon as
he was confronted with the risen Jesus, his faith moved on – he believed. May God
bless you in your starting point, in your questioning, in your exploring of
your faith, and throughout your Christian journey. Amen. Alleluiah,
Christ is Risen! He is risen indeed, Alleluiah! Amen.
Father Charles Howard: Anglican
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