Sermon: Faith

The Revd Canon Dr Nicholas Thistlethwaite is Sub Dean & Precentor

Preacher:: Nicholas Thistlethwaite
Date:: Sunday 8th August 2010
Service:: Eucharist
Readings:: Hebrews 11:1

Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1)

Children love a story. Whether it’s Harry Potter for the present generation, Narnia, the Railway Children or Alice in Wonderland for earlier generations, as children we ‘inhabit’ the stories we read or have read to us. The characters are vivid and real: they can become our secret friends. Even as adults we do this to some extent: a good novel has the power to captivate us. We come to believe in the world the novelist spreads before us, and we share the pains and joys, the hopes and aspirations of the characters. Yet now we know the difference between fiction and reality. As we turn the final page and lay down a much-enjoyed book, we know that the enjoyment has been the fruit of an act of complicity between the author’s imagination and our own.

Reading the Gospels – with their account of the beginnings of the Christian story – has similarities to this experience, and yet it is fundamentally different. Although the story again engages our imagination, invites our sympathies, and stirs our emotions, and although we know that there are some fictional elements, we also know that the vast majority of the characters and situations described by the evangelists are real. The disciples were flesh and blood, like you and me. Zacchaeus, Jairus, Pilate, Caiaphas, Mary and Martha were real people. Jesus was a young Jew who preached around the towns and countryside of Galilee in the first century, and was eventually executed outside Jerusalem. A novel refines our sensibilities, entertains us, perhaps deepens our understanding of our fellow human beings. The Gospels, on the other hand, with their intriguing mixture of history and spiritual imagination, fact and purposeful fiction, invite us to walk through a landscape in which we are challenged to address questions of interpretation and meaning and truth in a way that doesn’t apply when we are reading fiction.

To return to our text: ‘Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’.

The writer of the letter to the Hebrews offers us a useful tool to guide us through this varied landscape. We might describe it as a spiritual compass. Faith (our spiritual compass) enables us to make some sort of sense of what we observe around us. Elsewhere, Paul says that Christians ‘walk by faith and not by sight’ (2 Cor. 5.7), and that is surely his way of saying that something more than our human senses (our physical and mental antennae) is required if we are to navigate our way through the complexities, the disappointments and the frequent destructiveness of human living.

How does faith do this?

There are still those who peddle the old myth that Christian faith comes under the same heading as believing in fairies or aliens. It is ‘wishful thinking’, they say, or a hangover from childhood. But (we might ask) is it really so unreasonable to live by faith? And are there not other examples of this in the world around us?

When two people pledge themselves to one another in marriage, looking down the years that lie ahead to an unknowable future with confidence and hope, is that not living by faith? Or when two businessmen go into partnership, calculating the likelihood of success, five years down the line, is there not a fairly significant admixture of faith in that? When we board a plane, knowing that we will be carried thousands of feet into the air, and transported across oceans to another continent where we will arrive rested in six hours’ time, does that not involve faith: faith in the pilot, the likelihood of suitable weather conditions, and faith in the plane’s designer’s knowledge of aero-dynamics? In 1939, was it not a collective act of faith that steeled the British nation to fight on against Hitler, when many jeremiahs prophesied defeat?

So faith is not the sole preserve of the religious. Nor is it unreasonable. Negotiating the challenges to human living often requires a leap of faith, whether individual or collective. We cannot always assemble all the information we need to be assured of the outcome. Indeed, it can be argued that if people only acted on the basis of quantifiable, scientifically verifiable data, human existence would be immeasurably the poorer. Human beings advance by taking risks.

They also advance by taking ultimate questions seriously. By ‘ultimate questions’, I mean questions about human destiny, responsibility, moral obligation. Often, today, the dismissal of religious belief, or the attempt to deride it as credulous or superstitious, is actually an evasion of these questions. Yet an adult consciousness demands that we face these questions. Why am I here? What is my purpose? Who am I? In our western secularised society these fundamental questions are less and less a feature of public discourse. The god of this passing age (materialism) blinds us to their importance. Like the ‘bright young things’ of the 1920s, we dance away, heedless of the consequences of our blindness.

By contrast, faith takes the future seriously. It is always, to use a technical term, eschatological. In other words, it has its sights set on a future yet to be revealed. That’s what eschatology is. However gloomy or discouraging the landscape through which we journey, faith gives us hope for the future. Of course, we cannot be certain of everything. Consequently, it is fashionable to say that doubt is the corollary of faith. Rather than doubt, I prefer to speak of an honest admission of ‘not knowing’. This is what Paul means when he writes to the Christians in Corinth, ‘Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known’ (I Cor 13:12). Paul admits his ignorance – the limitations of his faith – but he is not unduly troubled by it, and nor should we be.

For human beings, there is a choice. Faith offers a way of understanding and interpreting the human condition. At its heart is belief in the goodness of God, and the willingness of God to express that goodness in his care for his creation, and particularly for the human race among whom he became incarnate. In Jesus, men and women encountered God, and learned the power of a love which held nothing back from the task of leading human beings to that true homeland prepared for them. In Jesus, we are invited to share ‘the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen’, and to set out for the ‘better country’ that is promised.

The alternative, it seems to me, is a prospect so bleak as to be unbearable. For it is a picture of a material order which hurtles inescapably towards extinction; a world in which moral order is simply a matter of self-interested pragmatism; a society in which love is an expression of biological need and nothing more.

William Wordsworth, in his poem entitled ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’ contemplated the natural landscape through which he journeyed and found in it a prescience of the divine. ‘I have felt’, he wrote

a presence that disturbs me with the sense

of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

of something far more deeply interfused

whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

and the round ocean, and the living air

and the blue sky, and in the mind of man …

He didn’t express this in the language of dogma, but underlying the romantic sensibility is a conviction (a faith) that the world is ‘full of blessings’. Examining himself, Wordsworth had detected an innate moral sense that convinced him that he was not alone in the universe, but possessed of a nature that could respond to something beyond: to God. As the philosopher John Cottingham has put it, in his excellent little book, Why believe?,

the creative power that ultimately shaped us is itself the source of values we find ourselves constrained to acknowledge, and has made our nature such that we can find true fulfilment only in seeking those values. (:5)

St Augustine put it more concisely, and in doing so summed up the reason for that ‘assurance of things hoped for’, and ‘conviction of things not seen’ when he wrote so memorably,

You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in you.

That is the ‘better country’; that is ‘the city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God’ (Hebrews 11:10).