Sermon Sunday 9th September 2018 St Paul s, Wimbledon Park Belief in God Isaiah a; James ; Mark The gospel reading contains

Transcription

1 Sermon Sunday 9th September 2018 St Paul s, Wimbledon Park Belief in God Isaiah a; James ; Mark The gospel reading contains familiar stories of Jesus working his healing miracles: stories we ve heard and read before. But one verse struck me particularly: Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one. These healings were so dramatic, that the news must have spread everywhere. But so often Jesus swore people to secrecy, as if he didn t want the truth to get out. Of course, what he wanted to avoid was easy publicity. But why did he order them to tell no one? If there was to be no talk about what he did, no evidence, how were people to hear the good news? How did they come to know God? And how are we to come to know God, to believe in God, and in the miracles which he surely works? I heard on the news this morning that the national Commission on Religious Education has recommended that religious education in schools should include not only other faiths, but also atheism and humanism. This recommendation has been welcomed by the head teachers union, by the Church of England, and by Humanists UK. So it s important that our children understand why we believe in God, and what our beliefs are. Are so we need to be secure ourselves! It is a simple fact that millions of people the world over believe in God; religious experience the knowledge of God s presence with us is an undeniable fact of life. The philosopher Nietzsche said a

2 2 hundred years ago that God is dead; but it s not true. We believe in a God who is still the same God as he always has been and always will be despite the fact that the way we talk about him and the way we worship him have developed; and our belief is entirely consistent with reason and all the observable facts of the world; there is nothing that contradicts belief in God not the theory of evolution, not the existence of evil and suffering, not the fact of religious conflict and wars. More than just believing in a God who exists, we believe in God who acts in the world he acted so long ago to redeem the people of Israel from slavery, and he acts to redeem us, to save us, from the nothingness which is all there would be if there were no God. And we believe that God wants us to respond to his love for us. But if we are to be able to justify our faith to others, we have to think out what our belief means, and we have to think what God is like. Members of other faiths have very different ideas about God; and there are different ways of thinking about God not only in the different branches of Christianity, but even in the Anglican Church itself. We all know other Christians and indeed other Anglicans who have very different political views from our own, for instance; and there are theological differences too, in the way other Christians, and indeed other Anglicans, think about God. Our beliefs are not laid down in clear, unequivocal terms, either in the Bible or elsewhere no matter how much some people would like this to be the case. We have to work out our own beliefs for ourselves. But how can this be? If God is eternal and unchanging, how can the expressions of belief vary so much? How can they change so much from one age to another? And can we really believe in a

3 3 philosophy that seems to change all the time and from person to person? These are challenges which are often levelled against us, and which are to be taken seriously. And there are more. Many people think that religion is irrelevant to modern life. The general modern view seems to be that no philosophy is of any use if it hasn t a cash value if they don t have practical advantages, beliefs are meaningless. And haven t the great advances of science and technology made religious belief unnecessary? If we don t face up to these challenges we re not carrying out the command Jesus gave his followers to preach the Gospel, because these are the stumbling blocks which prevent many people from believing. I can only offer a few suggestions that might help us think out our own answers to these challenges. Firstly, our ideas are changing constantly as we use the brains God has given us to think about the world. The more philosophy and science develop, the more we realise that our knowledge is much more limited than we usually suppose. Many ways of describing what we believe is true, either about the world or about God, will sooner or later turn out to be incomplete or sometimes wrong. Earth s proud empires pass away, and so do its philosophies, its technologies and its theologies. But in all these changing ideas, not everything is swept away: there s a building up of gains and achievements. In the last century people were travelling by stage coach, and we now travel by car and bicycle and bus and train but we don t have to re-invent the wheel each time. And in the same way our thinking about God develops; we build certainty over the course of time which allows us to make judgements, with confidence for instance when we say that God first loved us before we loved him, or that there is nothing that can ever separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. Those things don t change.

4 4 Men and women have always been thinking about God, trying to explain his behaviour and the nature of the world, and some of our ideas about him have been wrong; but there is a central core of truth which has been built up, and even though the language we have to use is limited and inadequate to describe what is after all beyond our imagining or understanding, it s that language and tradition have been tested over the centuries by men and women who have lived with God as the One in whom they ve put their trust and they ve not been disappointed. The tradition, built up over the centuries by so many believers, helps us to interpret what we see in the world, helps us see God in our own experience of the world. The variety of the images enriches the way we experience God. And this brings me to the second set of suggestions I want to offer on the question of language. The way we speak about God affects the way we know him. We are often embarrassed to talk about God because the sort of words we find ourselves using are so different from the words of ordinary speech. We speak in picture language: we speak of heaven and hell, of King and subjects, of the body of Christ. This sort of language is so different from the literal, day to day talk of the world that it sounds to some people like a fairy tale. It seems that there are two forms of language; the objective, scientific language of the intellect, and the subjective, poetic language of the imagination. Atheists find it easy to reject religion, saying it is all mythology, all fairy tales. Humanists may be more sympathetic, and say it is harmless but only of value because of the personal comfort the individual gets from it religion is just a personal matter. Conservative Christians close their minds and insist that everything is literally true that

5 5 God did create the world in six days and so on, and that he does reign above the sky with Jesus at his right hand. But it s really a false distinction to make between the two sorts of language. Even the scientific language is pictorial language, an attempt to describe the world in words, just like the scientific theories are attempts to understand the baffling facts of nature. And the poetic language we use about how we feel when we see beauty or suffering is just as valid. The bible writers often use word pictures to describe God which are obviously not literally true, but while they are saying he is like a human judge, or a human king, or a human parent, at that same time there are other ways in which he is not like a human judge or king or parent at all, because he is more than just that. The hymn we sing sometimes speaks of Jesus as my shepherd, brother, friend, my prophet, priest and King; my Lord, my life, my way, my end none of these are literally true of course, but they are attempts to describe, in merely human terms, something that is much greater than human language can describe. Our human language is invented for human purposes, and has to be stretched when we want to describe God. But still it s valuable as in the way Jesus used the word Father to bring home the closeness of the relationship God offers each of us. So the language we use about God is picture language, and it s developed over the centuries to enable us to communicate the indescribable. Jesus used picture language, simple picture language, and that s how he wanted people to learn about God not by seeing showy signs.

6 6 Knowledge of God comes first, and then we can see the signs, all around us, in the way God helps us, in the healing we see in the world, in the way things do come together. The words we use about God suggests that he s a person at least that we can relate to him in some ways like we relate to other human beings. We know that people contain an unfathomable mystery and a wonderful creativity: and we know that these come from the God in whose image we were made. Our knowledge of God, built on the traditions of the ages, tells us that we are creative, free to make decisions for ourselves. We can use that intelligence to get to know better the universe he has created. And these are the things we need to tell people, and the children. But ultimately our knowledge of God goes beyond the limits of language, beyond human words. We are nearer to God when we stop trying to define God, when we stop looking for signs, when we just open ourselves to him. Amen. O Sabbath rest by Galilee, O calm of hills above, when Jesus knelt to share with thee the silence of eternity, interpreted by love.