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Sunrise in Northern New South Wales The following is my sermon in St. Paul's Cathedral, Dunedin on Sunday April 28, 2019 When people speak of “faith”, what they usually mean is “belief”. So we talk of “believer’s baptism”, or when we want to enquire after someone’s relationship with God we ask, “do you believe in God?” and what follows next is usually a conversation about whether or not God exists. Faith is, in other words, about facts. It’s about the universe as we perceive it, and what happens or not as the case may be. But I think that when the New Testament talks about faith, it’s actually talking about something else. 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 expl...

There was, apparently, in the 18th Century, a native American chief who was a prodigy in languages. In the year after his first European contact he became fluent in Spanish, Italian, English and French, and was taken to England as a kind of curiosity. At dinner one night at some university college or other, when the subject turned to the differences between languages, he was asked "What is the grammar of your own language?" He replied, "My language has no grammar." The story may or may not be true, but illustrates an always true phenomenon which everyone encounters the moment they start to learn a new language: the grammar of our own language is invisible to us, except when some teacher drearily and pointlessly insists on showing us, although those of other languages are powerfully and bafflingly obvious the moment we encounter them. It's not just linguistic grammars, of course. Grammar is the set of rules and principles by which a language is organised, ...

St. Hilda's Collegiate School, taken with my phone after a recent meeting. This picture has nothing whatsoever to do with what follows, but I like the interplay of shapes and particularly the shadow on the wall. My mother is a Methodist, liberal in her theological and social opinions. My father was a socialist, just slightly to the left, in his politics, of Karl Marx. My siblings -there are 5 of us- are all bright, eloquent and omnivorous in their consumption of books and other intellectual fodder.  One of my most cherished childhood memories is of mealtimes in our little state house. The food was ingested with copious amounts of spirited, opinionated, clever and sometimes informed debate on whatever subject happened to catch the attention of one of the family that day. Or whatever one of us thought might get a rise out of someone else. So, sex, politics and religion it was then - oh and motorbikes, economics, international relations, demographics, cricket, company ownersh...

One of the confusions to which we Christians are prone is that between Faith and Belief. We have so identified faith with belief that we use them as synonyms: we speak of believer's baptism when we talk of the sacrament which marks someones start on the journey of faith and ask " what do you believe in " when really we mean " what do you have faith in ?" My supervisor, Paul, was very helpful today when I talked with him about the reaction of some people to the last few posts I had written on here. I thought I had been talking about my progress on the path of faith but found that I had caused some angst in others over matters of belief; and when people tried to engage me on matters of belief, of course the inevitable happened: we talked past each other to the mystification of both, because we were entirely missing the point. Or at least, I was. Faith is a verb. You don't have it, you do it. It  has more to do with trust than it does with belief, altho...