Sunrise in Northern New South Wales
The following is my sermon in St. Paul's Cathedral, Dunedin on Sunday April 28, 2019
The noun used in the New Testament is pisteuo, which means something like “I put my trust in”. So faith isn’t about belief, it’s about trust. It’s not about struggling to believe a whole lot of stuff which cannot be proven, but it is, rather, an attitude or a way of thinking about what we believe. If you’ll bear with me for a bit I’ll try and explain that. But to do that, I’ll need to take the scenic route.
A year ago, when he was 4, my grandson Noah came to me and asked “Pappa, is heaven before or after space?” A great question, don’t you think? He had just had his first encounter with the universality of death, and my daughter Bridget had reassured him by telling him about heaven. He needed, of course, to fit that in with what he knew of the universe, and it seems that his world was his own version of a medieval layered cosmos.
He knew there was the ground, of course, and, above that, a layer where the clouds were; and above the clouds the sky; and above that was space, that wonderful realm where Luke Skywalker lives and where they have planets and aliens and stars. He was asking where this new layer fitted.
Now nobody had ever taught him this worldview, he’d figured it all out himself from what he had understood and observed of what was going on around him, and a pretty good effort it was too - after all, for many hundreds of years a version of this schema was believed by some very bright people.
There’s two things I want you to notice about the way Noah saw and understood the world. The first is, that what he believed about the world was not chosen. The universe presented itself to him, and, through his sensory systems he interpreted what was presented, and an organisation of all that data sort of fell into place. So it is for all of us. Our organising of the data and the consequent ideas we have about how the world is made and how it works are largely unconscious. We don’t choose to see the world the way we do, our worldview is circumstantial not chosen, and our beliefs about the world are very strong. For example, just yesterday I flew back from Australia on the A380, the big one which weighs in at about 500 tonnes. Now I understand perfectly well the theory of how planes fly, but walking past that enormous pile of aluminium I still can’t believe that it can get itself off the ground in Sydney and move at 1000 kph all the way to Christchurch – even when I’ve experienced it doing so dozens of times.
The second thing I want you to notice is that Noah’s beliefs are likely to change. In a few years at the most, Noah will exchange his layered version of the universe for another possibly more accurate one. This is something that will happen to him many times over in the course of his life. And again, this happens to us all.
For me, one such change happened when I was in my early 50s. One of my parishioners, Wes Sandle, who as many of you know is a retired professor of physics, made a deal with me. He came to my place every Wednesday and I taught him theology while he taught me physics. We did this for 3 or 4 years. I don’t know how much theology Wes ever learned, but he changed the entire way I perceived the world. He taught me, for example, that matter isn’t matter at all, but mostly empty space containing minuscule bits of stuff, which is probably not matter either, but is instead differing types of energies. He taught me things about the way those little pieces of stuff behave, which I assent to be true, but still can’t quite believe, but we don’t need to go into all that here, other than to say that the world was a different place for me after my conversations with Wes.
Now every time we adopt a new world view, we must give up the old one, after we first realise its shortcomings. So, our growth perception involves us constantly in doubt, then new understanding then doubt again. Doubt is a lifetime companion, in other words, and it is a necessary component of belief. And as we get older we begin to realise that we only ever answer one question by asking another two, and we realise that our beliefs about pretty much everything are, at best, tentative. One of the marks of maturity is that, even though we come to have more and more knowledge, we believe less and less.
So, just to recap, beliefs are not chosen and they are constantly changing.
Trust, on the other hand, is more likely to be conscious, and therefore chosen, and it can be constant.
The Universe is presented to us and we form our ideas about what it is and how it works, and then we evaluate it. We make a call about whether the world is ordered or chaotic, is threatening or benign, is good or bad. We make this judgement and hold this attitude to the things we believe. And this attitude is our faith. The New Testament invites us to adopt a particular faith: that is, an attitude to life and to the world we live in which is characterised by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That is, we are invited to interpret the world as purposed, as loving, and as following the pattern of death and resurrection which marks Jesus’ life, death and resurrection.
Think about this morning’s Gospel. Thomas’ problem wasn’t about belief; after all, all the other disciples seem to have had trouble believing in the facts of the resurrection as well as Thomas. We are told, for example, that when Jesus finally ascended into heaven there were some of the disciples who saw it and yet still doubted; or in other words, some who still couldn’t believe the evidence of their own eyes.
Thomas’ problem wasn’t one of belief it was one of trust.
If we follow his story in John’s Gospel we get a picture of a man who is increasingly disillusioned, and losing his ability to trust Jesus. For example, when Jesus and the disciples were across the Jordan and receive news of Lazarus death, Jesus says he is going to Judea, to which Thomas responds, with an Eyeore like depression,“let us go so that we can die with him”. And at the last supper, Jesus says he is going somewhere and that the way is known. To which Thomas responds “Lord we don’t know where you are going, so how can we know the way?” [ sub text – and I don’t think you know where you are going either, and you seem as lost as we are]
It’s a picture of a man becoming more and more disillusioned, less and less trustful. That is, he is becoming less and less faithful. And as his faith in Jesus decreases so does his connection with the community of the disciples, until, when Jesus appears after the resurrection, Thomas is not even present. What is restored by Jesus is not Thomas’ beliefs – though those, along with those of all the disciples, certainly change – but his trust.
Faith is about trust, not about belief. Beliefs can change and vary and waver, sometimes by the day – by the hour, in fact - but through all that we can be constant in trust – that is, in faith.
Now all of this is well and good, as we think of the Bible story, but I want to think for a bit about how it applies to a very personal issue. In fact, the same big issue confronted by the disciples after the resurrection, that is, Life and Death and how these relate.
All of us will probably, at some stage receive a significant phone call. Our GP will phone and say that very worrying phrase, “there’s nothing to worry about” and continue “can you come and see me first thing tomorrow and bring your spouse?” I’ve had four such phone calls, the last one being only a few weeks ago. As many of you know, I have metastatic prostate cancer. That means that unlike many of you I can have a pretty good guess at what I’m going to die of and even, to some extent, when. Every time I’ve had one of those calls and the illness has moved on to some exciting new development, I’ve had to face, again, my own mortality and been forced to ask myself “what is going to happen on that day when I close my eyes for the last time and step out of this 3 dimensional reality for ever?”
And the answer? I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea.
Now don’t get me wrong. I do believe in life after death. In the course of a long ministry I’ve sat with many people who were dying – on a few occasions, being present at the moment of death. Many people have shared with me their remarkable experiences of their loved ones after those loved ones have died. About half a dozen times people have told me of being declared clinically dead and then being revived and what happened to them during that process. On the basis of all that, I believe that my consciousness will survive the death of my body.
But what that will be like, exactly, I just don’t know. Oh sure, I’ve trawled through the Bible and read what it has to say on the subject, but actually it doesn’t say all that much. It’s not some sort of oversight on the part of the Holy Spirit. I think we are not told much because we are simply not capable of understanding.
Clemency has a metaphor for this. She compares our perceptions of the afterlife to the understandings of a baby in the womb. In utero the infant lives what must appear, to it, to be a full and complete life. From time to time some rumours of another world – sounds, movements, or perhaps emotions transmitted by its mother – make their way into its world, but how can it know what these are, or what they mean for the life that lies ahead? – about ice cream, and St Paul’s cathedral, and birds and the sea? It can’t know because it can’t even have a grasp of the building blocks out of which our perception is formed – light and dark, up and down, cold and hot and so forth.
In the same way that the baby emerges into this unimaginable world, I trust that when I die, I will emerge from this life into another, as much bigger and fuller and richer and more complete, as is this life compared to life in the womb.
I don’t know, so I don’t believe much at all about the afterlife. But I do trust. I trust that God has given us, in Jesus Christ the best picture we are ever going to get of what lies at the heart of reality. That the life death and resurrection of Jesus Christ shows me what lies ahead- a reality marked by complete love and absolute understanding and acceptance. And just as the pattern of death and resurrection demonstrated in Jesus’ life seems to apply to every single thing in the universe, so it will apply to my own consciousness. At death I believe I am going to be in for a big surprise, and I trust that that surprise will be good. Very, very good.
So Jesus calls us to live a life of faith. That does not mean that he expects us to believe a whole lot of unprovable and improbable stuff. It does not mean he wants us to give assent to a long list of propositions. It means that he invites us to trust – That our lives have purpose and direction. That we are known. That we are held in a love which far, far exceeds our wildest imaginings. And that he means what he says when he tells us that he goes ahead to prepare a place for us.
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